Once upon a walk

It's been mentioned that Bill and I went for a walk down in Tongariro National Park from Boxing Day for a couple of nights. I haven't got around to giving details of where we went, so here you go...

The girls + kids were staying in Taupo while we were out in the bu

sh, so we planned an easy first day to give us time to get them into their accommodation and so on. We got to the roadend at Mangatepopo

somewhere around 3pm, with only a short walk up to Mangatepopo Hut where we were going to camp for the night. Once we got there and set tent up, we figured seen as the weather was perfect, we may as well go for a stroll and try to get up Mt Pukekaikiore - a little (only 1692m, next to Mt Ngauruhoe's 2287m) lump of rock

nearby. The walk up and back was reasonably easy - once we'd got far enough around to skirt the cliffs. We were back at the tent by about 7pm for dinner.

The next morning was cold and clear, and looked to be a beautiful day. We started to head up the valley towards South Crater, but as we got closer, a little cap of cloud appeared on top of Mt Ngauruhoe. That usually indicates strong winds up there. The cap got a bit bigger, and by the

time we got to the head of the valley, the cloud was down to

around 1500m and it certainly was windy - probably around 50km/hr. We decided we may as well attempt Ngauruhoe anyway, but gave up when it became clear that we weren't going to see anything and it was going to be a huge effort, particularly in the wind. Returning to the trail, the cloud lifted a little to give us a view of the expanse of South Crater, and a glimpse of snow on the other side just below Mt Tongariro's summit. Bill had never been to any snow before, so we headed across the crater to go and build a snowman. That brought us to

lunch time, huddled behind the one rock in that part of South

Crater to keep out of the wind. The other side of South Crater is the climb up to the top of Red Crater, which was more exposed to the wind - probably gusting around 70km/hr now. The cloud lifted enough to give us spectacular views of the crater and Emerald Lakes nearby. The descent from the lakes was steep and seemed to take forever - walking across some spectacular countryside - all sand and weird rock formations. We finally arrived at Oturere Hut, exhausted from a huge day. The forecast was for the weather to significantly deteriorate - wind getting up to 130km/hr and rain to go with it. During the night, that certainly came true - my little tent got a battering despite it's relatively sheltered position and we didn't get much sleep. We packed everything up

(including the camera in the pack - those sort of conditions are not quite suited to picture-taking!) and headed off.

Fortunately the wind was a north-wester, so it blew us in the right direction down to Waihohonu - I would not have liked to attempt to walk into that sort of gale. The last stretch from Waihohonu down to SH1 (the Desert Road) was pretty miserable - windy, wet, and pretty boring. I'd managed to give Mel slightly wrong directions, so she couldn't find us for a little while. By the time she did, I was thoroughly soaked through and very cold. She was not happy with my directions. Bad combination. Anyway, we did find each other and managed to get back to Taupo to warm up, dry out and get some lunch at McDonalds.

Full set of photos at flickr, as usual!