We made it back to the North Island on Monday evening and headed back to Wellywood Backpackers in Wellington. The next day we did some walking around town and took a trip to the Te Papa Museum before meeting up with some friends from back home in Chicago. My buddy Burton who I used to work with at Pixel, along with his girlfriend Sarah and their friend June, were able to work it out to come see us on the front end of a trip to Australia. It was great to have some familiar faces around and catch up on news from back home over some beers.
From there we all headed up to Whakapapa, a small village in Tongariro National Park, where Jenny and I planned to do the Tongariro Crossing the next day. The Tongariro Alpine Crossing is the most popular day-hike in New Zealand and ranked by Lonely Planet as one of the top 10 day-hikes in the world. Having now finished it, I can certainly understand why!
Jenny and I had planned on doing the crossing on the way down to the South Island when we first arrived in New Zealand, but the park was closed due to bad weather. This time we were much more lucky and enjoyed near perfect conditions. We were also able to talk our “fresh off the boat” friends into joining us on the 19+ KM (we’ll get to the + in a minute) 9ish hour hike. I’ll admit I was a little worried for them at first, but they held their own quite well and ended up being really grateful that we talked them into it.
Now for the fun part of the story. The 19.4 KM of track that make up the crossing runs right through the heart of Tongariro National Park. Tongariro National Park is made up primarily of three active volcanic mountains — Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe, and Tongariro. For all the “Lord of the Rings” fans out there, this is better known to you as Mordor! And the “+” part that I mentioned is the optional climb you can take up to the crater of Mt. Ngauruhoe — better known to Peter Jackson as “Mt. Doom.” Yes, that’s right, following in the unusually large footsteps of Frodo and Sam we actually summited Mt. Doom.
