The Tongariro Crossing is considered one of the -- if not the -- best one-day walks in all of New Zealand, and maybe even the world. It's a 17 km trek (about 10 miles for the metrically challenged) through a volcanic National Park in which you walk by shimmering blue lakes, tramp through volcanic craters and gaze at three (active) volcanoes, including Mt. Ngurahoe (pronounced Na-gar-ah-hay), which was used as Mordor in Lord of the Rings. Overall, it's supposed to be stunning scenery non-stop for eight hours. I wouldn't know though.
As I left for the National Park at 8 am, I set out with a weather forecast that said I might encounter a few light showers -- which is not so bad considering you're in the mountains -- and overall good visibility. It was the same forecast as the day before and that turned out to be a fine tramping day. Well, whoever made the forecast for Friday, I won't go so far as to say he's a liar, but he wasn't even fucking close.
At the start of the trip, a gentle incline through a river and some volcanic rocks, we had a very light mist, the type that you don't even feel it or hear it hitting you, but you look down and realize you're starting to get very wet. At the start of the walk I was thinking of what a girl in my lodge had told me, (she said it in much better words) but she said to focus on what you can see and make the most out of it and don't worry about what you don't have. So I did that, taking pictures of red rock with a foggy backdrop and what not. Then I reached Soda Springs, where you make an ascent for about 300 meters that is all but straight up. Soda Springs is the last chance to turn back and head off to Whakapapa Village (in Maori, "wh" makes an f sound, and when a local pronounces the name, it sounds slightly incestuous) and try my luck another day. I instead decided to push on to climb the first crater.
I had the company of two very friendly Dutch guys, but that was the only enjoyable part. Just as we started the ascent, it started pouring, my pants, my shirt, my pack were all completely soaked and had changed color before we had even been climbing for 15 minutes. The ascent went on for an hour and a half. Once we finally made the top, wheezing and shooting snot rockets from the cold, my head pounding from the sudden elevation shift, we walked along a part called the saddle, which leads up to the next crater. The saddle had at this point become one long mud track. At the edge of the saddle, we reached Ngaruhoe. The day before, I had a lovely view of it from my hostel, a few miles away -- this day, the fog was so dense I could've walked into the side of the damn volcano before I even realized it was there. I imagined that if Frodo and Sam had reached the same spot in the same conditions, Sam would look at his friend and say, "You know what, buddy, you were right. This is your burden, see you back in the Shire. I'll buy you a beer next time."
At that point, though, I had no option to turn around that didn't involve an arduous trip back down the crater. Either way, the Crossing was something that I had set out to do in order to see some beautiful scenery and get some nice exercise. But after getting pissed down on and blown around like a rag doll for three solid hours it became a mission dammit, and I was going to conquer this thing. As we started the second ascent, the wind started to pick up. A lot. Like, hold on to something or you might get blown off the mountain, pick up. At one point I had to dive behind a large rock with two German girls so that wouldn't be my fate. At this point we were supposed to see beautiful craters and reaching the Emerald Lakes. We could see maybe 10 feet in front of us. (In all, I saw a lake. No craters. No volcanoes. Just one, single solitary lake.)
The descent from the crater might've been even worse. It wasn't so much climbing down as setting your body side ways, stepping forward with your lead foot and then sliding down as much as possible with your back arched parallel to the ground. By the end, I had enough silt in my sneakers to match the water level and I could've started my own beach.
This went on for about 3.5 to 4 hours when all of a sudden, I turned a corner and I could see about 100 feet in front of me. Then I heard birds singing. I turned to the right, and all of a sudden there was beautiful scenery -- the type that had been promised to me all along -- out in front of me. Mountains zig-zagged out to the horizon with a stream cutting through, as if the mountains had all once been in line and all jumped to alternate side to make room for the stream to snake through. It all led up to Lake Taupo, New Zealand's largest lake, which was matching the new blue of the sky. I would love to show you all pictures of the site, but when I tried to turn on my camera, it wouldn't obey orders (I later was able to kick it back to life, but the LCD screen is fucked. I'm hoping that my screen -- and not all my pictures -- will have a series of green bars running through it). And then, this scenery that I'd been waiting hours for pulled a Kaiser Soze, and like that (fwah), it was gone. A shroud of mist had dropped back on the lakes and mountains as quickly as it had lifted and I walked depressed all over again to a hut down the road to stop for lunch and a defrosting. I held my hands over the hut's space heater for a solid 10 minutes before enough sensation returned that I could even acknowledge that it was giving off heat. I then struggled for several minutes to open my bread and eat my sandwiches. I chatted with this nice Scottish guy who opened the conversation, without the least bit of irony and a complete straight face, "That wasn't so great, was it?"
At least at the very end the sun poked through again so I could not feel totally miserable about the situation, and at the end (everyone in the group blitzed through the trek in record time, no point in bothering to stop and take a picture or even a deep breath) we all felt like we had accomplished something -- something more than all those pansies who frolic through the Crossing in bright sunshine. At least that's the way I look at it without getting thoroughly annoyed.
The plus side was, at the end of the tramp, I wasn't tired at all, even after 10 miles of walking up and deep steep craters. That's because I had trained myself with a ludicrous hike a few days earlier in Taupo. The guy at my hostel recommended that I walk along the Whanganui River up to the Ariatiata (spelling??) Dam since I was after an activity that would cost me something in the neighborhood of nothing. At first, the walk was beautiful. The river was a deep, rich green with turquoise spots where there were rocks underneath. Absolutely stunning. It was one of those scenes that's so beautiful and serene that your mind is allowed to wander into depths that honking horns and ringing cell phones will never allow you to reach and then only a few minutes later when you come to you realize you haven't been paying attention to the beauty you were admiring in the first place. The walk took me past waterfalls and rapids and through woodlands, including one pine forest in which every tree had turned brown. It was a great walk, but it was long, really long, and the sun was excruciating. By the end of the trail, where I took a dip in the thermal pool, my legs could barely carry me and my arms and face started to ache from the onset of sunburn. As I got about three blocks from my hostel, the balls of my feet were screaming in agony and my left knee filed a protest against the rest of my body, refusing to flex or do much in the way of supporting my weight. When I stumbled back to my hostel I asked the guy behind the desk, "Alright mate, now that I've done the damn thing, exactly how far did I walk?" He flashed what I translated as a sadistic smile and responded, "22 k's." Allow me to translate. That's 13.1 miles. A half marathon. Bloody fantastic. I hobbled for the rest of the day and part of the next.
And that's about that. I'm in Wellington at the moment, hoping to meet up with this girl who I met last night and spent all day today walking around the Te Papa museum. (The museum was free, and actually really interesting. They had large exhibits dedicated to Maori culture, and today only, had the New Zealand forensic team in teaching people about fingerprint tracing and DNA reading -- a real life CSI. Very cool.) Tomorrow I'm hiring a car and jetting the length of the North Island, from Wellington to the Bay of Islands, north of Auckland. And for the dirt cheap price of $NZ 19. Plus I get to drive on the wrong side of the road. That could be a whole story in itself.
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