In the morning, we could see our destination through the window … more volcanos … Mount Ruapehu on the left, Mount Ngauruhoe (aka Mount Doom) in the middle, and Mount Tongariro, smoking, on the right.
Tramping is a uniquely Kiwi name for trekking, hiking or bushwalking, and strictly speaking, since we didn’t camp on our tramps, maybe they didn’t quite qualify, but our partial ascent of Mount Ruapehu felt very much like tramping to us!
We took the chair lift up to 2020m then climbed another 280m on the Skyline Route, marked by poles, over rocky terrain and scree to a great panorama at the top of the ridge through the breaks in the cloud that had started to descend. The landscape is stark, no wonder it was chosen as Mordor in The Lord of the Rings and we could easily imagine a pack of marauding orcs crossing the plain.
On the way down, we saw Mead Wall where Gollum sneaked up on Frodo.
We also walked to the very pretty Tawhai Falls …
… nd took a longer walk to Taranaki Falls, where the Wairere stream plunges 20m over the end of an old lava flow.
The path crossed rocky scrub and heather and we were looking forward to good views of Mount Ngauruhoe, otherwise famous as Mount Doom from Lord the Rings, but cloud obscured the summit throughout.
We stayed in Whakapapa village, not at the imposing Chateau Tongariro …
… but at the tiny holiday park set in beech trees.
Just spending one night here, then making our way back north towards Auckland.
Off Travelling Together 