Day 148: Huka Falls, then the Hidden Valley, Orakei Korako

We planned to go to Hobbiton today, but due to a continuation of grey weather, we opted to skip it and check out other places around Taupo before heading up to Auckland.

Huka Falls is just a little way out from Lake Taupo (past the prawn farm) and it's about a five minute walk from the little carpark. This picture hardly does justice to the water's brilliant shade of blue. Unbelievable.

Since we had a change of plans, we ended up taking a slight detour to Orakei Korako, the Hidden Valley. If you ever make your way down to Orakei Korako, be warned that it is quite hidden. We ended up driving up and down a stretch of road for a little while, trying to find the road that would lead us there. Nonetheless, we managed it eventually and got to visit a tremendously neat geothermal area.

The whole area around Lake Taupo is a geothermal hotspot (see also: our visit to thermal pools last night), and there are a surprising amount of little nooks and crannies with some activity. To get to this place, you take a detour off the main motorway and enjoy a meandering tour of farmland and pine forests before reaching a little spot off the Waikato river.

Orakei Korako is actually on the opposite bank, so to get to the area itself, you need to take a little jetty boat over. Once you do, it's like you step into another world.

View of the Golden Fleece Terrace

We were there on yet another grey and gloomy day, but that really just added to the atmosphere of the place. There were plumes of smoke or steam coming off of the Golden Fleece Terrace and everything just seemed to slow down when we were there.

Emerald Terrace

As we walked around, I had just sense a sense of how raw this country is. New Zealand is, obviously, not known for its long-established cities or its thriving metropolitan scenes. It's very much a country of wilderness, and sometimes we would come across places that felt like they could have been there for millenia.

The fauna around the entire area felt like something out of the prehistoric age. There were unsettlingly bright palm trees peeking out of the dense vegetation, massive ferns. The steps and the aged signs and all of the signs of human involvement were conspicuous and looked out of step with the rest of the place.

Artist's Palette

Apparently, despite the seemingly pristine beauty of the place, there has been quite a bit of the human hand involved. In 1961, people built a dam that raised the level of the Waikato River and flooded a good portion of the active geothermal areas. In either case, what's left is really remarkable.

In the grey drizzle, everything seemed subdued and the entire world felt muted. I imagine that on a sunny day the colours of the place must be genuinely unearthly.

Sometimes all you can do is look at the country and think, Oh New Zealand.

Day 147: MOUNT DOOM

While we've been in New Zealand, Claire and I have actually not sought out any Lord of the Rings settings, and, for two ex-fanatics, have been remarkably blase about living in Middle Earth. However, with my brother in tow, we decided that we would have to make our way to Mordor. Or, in that silly English tongue, Tongariro National Park.

Today, we learned that one does not simply walk into Mordor.

(insert joke here)

One might say that one wakes up to a grey morning, dons many layers of wet weather gear and wool, drives through a blanket of fog and cloud, climbs many steep stairs in pouring rain, hears an impending thunderstorm, and then decides that destroying the One Ring isn't worth it and heads back to relax in some heated pools.

(Little known fact: That part was cut from the books.)

Anyhow, we woke up today to a grey morning and not the stealth sunny day that we had all been hoping for. Rather than just skip the crossing, we followed the advice of Ian, our good hostel keep, as well as a few others who had made the walk in the previous days and decided to go on until we couldn't.

Driving to Mangetata gave us a hint of what the weather was going to be like. The forests we drove through were tall and dark and the tops were lost to fog. It looked positively gothic. (Our windshield wipers did their level best to contribute, SKREE SKREE SKREE-ing with Psycho-esque verve.)

By the time we got to the start of the track, the weather had cleared up enough to alternate patches of almost-sun with drizzle, and I was saying things like, "Oh, this isn't too bad, guys! We can totally do this!" Of course, just as we hit the first ascent (as prefaced by many WARNING! and CAUTION! and ADVISORY! signs), the clouds gathered and waited to release buckets of rain at the opportune moment.

As we climbed, I think we were actually in the midst of the low hanging clouds because we were enveloped in white. The visibility of the path seemed more or less normal until you looked forward and saw that each dip and bend seemed to lead into nothing.

Is that the edge of a cliff? No, just a turn in the road.

Anyhow, we made it up to the Red Crater, which was a truly bizarre experience. The land itself was really sparse and flat, and it felt like we were in some combination of the moon and the American Southwest. Combine that with the fact that we were in the center of a crater in the middle of white clouds, and it was just this almost eerie sensation of isolation.

The only cure for isolation is more banana

At this point, all we had to do was climb one more uphill section, and then the rest would be downhill. However, as Claire started to pick out a path through the slippery and steep rock slope, the rain began to pick up again, slapping our raincoats as if to mock our optimism. As we made it about halfway up, thunder started to rumble in the distance and I began to have some serious reservations.

We ended up turning back shortly after, because the rain didn't seem to want to stop and I am a wet blanket. (And, in all seriousness, because I didn't want to test the three of us with a pretty rough uphill climb in a thunderstorm.)

As we turned back, it felt like we made the right choice because it began to pour rain. I am pretty sure that if I stood under a shower fully dressed and then jumped into a swimming pool, I could not have gotten wetter. Rainwater was streaming around our feet, flooding the little waterways they carved around the steps, and I could feel my socks squelching in my (waterproof) shoes. It was truly epic.

Of course, by the time we returned to the springs at the valley, the sun was starting to peek out and we ended up having a nice little picnic on the rocks.

Would you believe the hand holding the camera was raisin-y with wet?

The final walk back to the car was absolutely unbelievable, with beautiful skies and only the lightest sprinkle of oh-you! rain. We peeled off our layers to enjoy the sun, arranging them carefully in the car to avoid excessive puddles, and then took our leisurely way back to Turangi.

Oh, and then we nearly ran out of gas.

But anyway, we eventually got back to the hostel, our bodies aching and wet, and then Ian, our good hostel-keep, told us about the local thermal pools. We ended up trotting (or limping) or way over there and finished off the day soaking in some hot pools. That was pretty neat, especially since it started to rain and we had the dual combination of hot water and cool rain.

(And even in the pools, I'm pretty sure I wasn't as wet as I was coming down the mountain.)

And that was our Tongariro adventure! I confess, I was a bit bummed that we weren't able to do the whole walk, but I figure the sheer insanity of hurtling down a mountain in a thunderstorm more than balances it out.

Day 146: Onward, ho!

Claire and I spent the morning cleaning and scrubbing and doing general last minutely things. When we finally finished up, I snapped a few last pictures of our humble J'ville house, and then we went to our heavily loaded car to drive forward to the future.

It was all very momentous and exciting.

Closing the last locked door, or, who-knew-we-would-regret-this-thirty-seconds-later?

Unfortunately, as I stood at the driver's side of our car, I asked Claire if she had the car keys. This was only unfortunate because she looked blank, I had no idea where the keys were, and if we had left them in the house, well, all the doors were locked. Oops. We did a few futile loops of the house (sorry thieves and irresponsible movers, it turns out Claire is a very thorough door-locker and window-shut-er), then looked despairingly at Zigfrond, loaded down with a flat's worth of stuff.

It turns out the key was, unpredictably enough, in my bag the whole time! Ha! Ha! Ha! What a lark!

With that preliminary bout of heart attack out of the way, off we went to Wellington for our last round of errands and then up to Turangi to meet up with my brother.

We met him (about an hour and a half after we had planned to-- Sorry about that, brother mine!) at the Turangi i-Site where we found out that the grey weather that has been chasing us through the island was here to stay. I was hoping that the giant sodden blanket of clouds would miraculously clear in time for us to do the Tongariro Crossing, but the information lady seemed quite confident that that would not be the case. She told us the weather was predicted to be dismal and grey, with gusts of wind reaching 40 km/hr at the top of the mountain. She did not recommend doing the crossing tomorrow.

Ho hum, we thought, exchanging glances. As was our custom, we thanked her and decided to play it by ear.

Regardless of impending weather, it was exciting to be there: in Turangi with my brother and my most frondest of fronds, starting off on what promised to be an eventful adventure.

On the road!

Day 145: Brother, Reporting In! (December 16)

In a way, today is the day that the past few weeks and months have been leading up to. My brother was due to arrive in Auckland in the morning, and that would mark the start of our grand adventures.

Claire and I cleaned like fiends while I waited impatiently for him to call me. We'd discussed all of his hostel arrangements and pretty much every step between getting off the plane and meeting him in Turangi the next day, but there is something much more real about having your younger brother be out of touch, rocketing towards you in a giant metal tube with wings.

Eventually, about on schedule, he got in touch with me, and then I re-learned how incredible modern technology is. Within minutes, and across four cities and two hemispheres, my entire family had been notified that my brother had successfully made it to Auckland.

Once that was confirmed, I focused the rest of my attention on getting the house in order. Our landlady was ever accommodating and failed to get us help in moving furniture into the basement, so Claire and I spent the day hauling around a flat's worth of stuff. We are tetris masters, though, and managed to squeeze quite a lot of stuff into the tiny room in the basement allotted to storage. By the end of the day, I was a tad grumpy and was making crazy eyes at the world, but things were more or less in shape for us to go.

For our last dinner in Johnsonville, we had no tables nor chairs, so we ate in style: sitting cross-legged around a spread-out newspaper.

I will say this, though: it was delicious.

Day 143: Goodbye, Dolly :(

The past few days have been pretty intense, between me working on grad school applications and finalizing plans for my siblings to visit and the both of us sorting out house-business.

Sadly, one thing that we had to do to wrap up our time in Johnsonville was to pass Dolly along to someone who could take care of her.

Dolly, our cat for the past four and a half months, had originally been a stray who adopted 14A as her home. Neither our landlady nor our roommates had any particular claim to her, and since neither of them would be around, they had to find someone who could take care of her. (Well, when we first asked our landlady about Dolly's fate, she made a roundabout statement that went something like, "She came to us from the street, and she may have to return to where she came from." Thank you, landlady.) We ended up finding a lovely lady named Sandra who stepped up to the plate.

In either case, when it came time for Dolly to go, Sandra came with a little disposable cat carrier made of cardboard. I held Dolly for as long as she would let me and then Sandra swiftly-- and surprisingly skillfully-- crammed her into the cardboard box until all that was left was a box of extreme disgruntlement and Dolly's pink little nose pressing up against an air hole.

That, more than anything else, really struck me.

Anyway, Dolly was driven off to her new home just a few streets away, and 14A was, for once, catless and quiet.

One of many photos taken during one of my frequent cat-breaks

Day 140: A completely gratuitous gingerbread cookie post

Peargiraffe, catbanana, and the original dogmuffin

(Top Hat Man and Zigfrond in the background)

Sorry, dude.

The collected works.

Day 133: First glimpse of South Island

After the success of our Thanksgiving, our third cohost invited us out to join him for an afternoon along the southern coast of North Island. We'd planned for a few more friends to come, especially since we are starting to really realize what it means to leave Wellington. The whole crew wasn't able to make it, but a few of us made a day of it. We did a short walk from Owhiro Bay to the Red Rocks, then picnicked along a stretch of mossy rocks with our first glimpse of South Island peeking over the horizon. There were no seals at the seal colony, as they'd apparently left a few days or weeks before, but the day was so beautiful that I don't think any of us could be bothered to care much.

From our picnic vantage point, we could see the distant line of the Marlborough Sounds of South Island.

I felt a bit strange, seeing how close and how far South Island is. In a way, it symbolized some bisection of our New Zealand travels, a departure from the comfortable now. We have carved out a niche in Wellington with our friends and flat and cat. We've gotten jobs and made friends and have our weekly traditions. But in a few weeks, my siblings will visit and Claire and I will launch out onto a roadtrip with no definite end. We've been gearing up for the end of our time in Wellington, but it's been mostly focused on the things we need to finish and do and experience, and not the endless possibility stretched out before us.

South Island, so soon!