Back on the blogosphere! Apologies for my absence - internet's hard to come by here, and work is keeping me busy so it's taken a wee while to get through the pictures from the last chapter of adventures here in NZ. So, to pick up where we left off last time...Taupo. I spent a couple weeks there with Cory while he finished up work and went into a bit of a flurry of activity - mountain biking, swimming, volleyball, basketball, kayaking, horseback riding, hiking...it was nice to be somewhere warmer with access to all this stuff. After Cory's last day of work, we packed up, said our goodbyes, and headed south to the Kaimanawa Forest, which we used as a base for a couple awesome day walks before continuing to Wellington and the South Island:
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| Our campsite in the Kaimanawa Forest was shared with some military men on a recruit training exercise. They were pretty friendly and invited us over for tea and coffee each evening. |
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| Sunrise on the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, this time starting from the Ketetahi carpark. You can see Lake Taupo in the distance (it's huge...about the size of Singapore...). |
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| Golden molten sun. |
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| Cory. |
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| Bunkroom in Ketetahi Hut that got destroyed when the Te Maari crater on Tongariro erupted in November. Good thing no one was sleeping there... |
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| Looking north from Ketetahi Hut. |
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| An Emerald Lake! |
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| Misty weather starting to clear at the top of the Crossing. |
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| Mt Ngauruhoe playing peekaboo. |
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| Too busy taking a picture of Cory playing in the snow to realize he had a snowball in his hand... |
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| Central Crater. |
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| Finally the view I wanted! |
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| Lakes Rotoaira and Taupo, with the vent of the Te Maari crater spewing steam. |
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| Heading down. |
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| The highway of a trail we walked on. |
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| Active vent. |
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| Following day: a walk to the Urchin Trig in the Kaimanawa Forest for the volcano views. |
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| (left to right): Mt Ruapehu, Mt Ngauruhoe aka Mt Doom, Mt Tongariro, Lake Taupo. |
After this walk we headed to Wellington to catch our ferry from North to South. From there we headed pretty much straight to Christchurch with a few short stops along the way:
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| East coast of the South Island. Seal colony north of Kaikoura. |
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| Kaikoura is apparently that place you dream about as a kid where you get the ocean and the mountains in the same place. Cool. |
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| Playing chicken with the sea. |
After our little East Coast explorations, we hit Christchurch in time for the rain to start. Our plan was to get into the All Blacks (rugby) game against France that evening. The only hitch: we didn't have tickets. So we stood outside the stadium in the rain for more than two hours hoping someone would have some extra tickets to hawk off. I even made a tiny sign on my ipod that said "WE NEED TICKETS!" It felt pretty small and inadequate because people had to squint and stare to read it, but it must've worked, because a gentleman stopped and asked us how many tickets we wanted and came back ten minutes later with a buddy with two tickets to sell for cheap. Woohoo! The game was actually an epic one, with our Kiwi boys spanking the French 30-0. First shut-out in twenty-odd years. And we were there. Oh yeah.
From Chch we decided to make a quick stop in at Ohau before heading to the West Coast to unload some things and wait for the rain to subside (at least a little bit). The evening turned into a good one, an inpromptu gathering at Jock's house where we got to know a lot of our coworkers. Early the next morning, we were up and at 'em again, driving six hours to a DOC campsite just south of Hokitika from whence we explored the West Coast for a few days. We checked out the Pancake Rocks, collected greenstone (or at least, what we think might be greenstone) from the mountains near Hokitika, and got up close and personal with the famous glaciers:
