That mountain you are looking at is called: Mount Gauruhoe but you probably know it by another name. At least if you're a Lord of the rings fan.
That mountain is also known as Mount Doom. That's where Frodo Baggings took the ring to get it destroyed and if Frodo Baggings could climb it I wasn't going to be less. :-)
Today was the day for the Tongariro crossing. Considered by many the best 'one day hike' in NZ. The day couldn't be any better with not a cloud in the sky.
I had to get up early today and by early I mean...really early...
But it was worth it. This, without any doubt, was and probably will be one of the top 3 highlights in NZ for me.
Do you remember when I explained how people in NZ tend to pronounce 'wh' as 'f'?... well try this one:
As we started the climb very early the sun was still coming up
This is were we were heading (the Tongariro alpine crossing Ketetahi car park ), still a long way to go
,a few more landscapes
Finally...Mount Doom
Okay The Tongariro crossing doesn't pass through Mount Gauruhoe/Mount Doom nor Mount Tongariro these two summits are optional and most people don't do them specially the first one as we were told it was specially hard... but when did that ever stop me? The more they told me, the more it sounded like a challenge. :-)
So armed with nothing but the contents of our rucksacks four of us (Oscar, Jugo, Lim and myself) decided to attempt the climb and follow on the steps of Frodo Baggings.
it doesn't look far away, does it?... well it took us 1.5 hours to climb it (non-stop). It's not the kilometres, it's the terrain...sand and pebles extremely slippery
It's difficult to appreciate here but the ascent was horrible. There is no track and you are scrambling all the time as the ground is either small rocks or sand so you are always going 2 steps forwards 1 step back and sliding down... also you are climbing about 1000 metres and it's all on the ridge of the mountain...no breaks since if you stop you'll end up sliding down, you just have to keep going.
We managed to do the climb in 1.5 hours but it broke our legs...(figuratively speaking of course) I've never climbed anything this hard in my life...and I've climbed a lot of mountains...
The views were second to none though...
photos from the top (2291m)
The descend was probably worse than the climb with all the falling rocks rolling down the mountain with every step...
I even made a very short video, but it was short as I didn't want to have one hand occupied while descending
more photos from the descend
Once back at the bottom we continued with the standard Tongariro Crossing as we still had 11.3Km to go
The Red Crater (1886m)
The Emerald lakes (you could smell the sulphur)
still 10.4Km to go
And from here it was all going down...
and still 6.4 km to go
and more descend...
With 3.1 Km to go
the landscape changed radically... Up until this point it was all very bare volcanic from this point onwards you can tell the volcanic soil is very rich and good for the plants...
And we finally made it...it only took us 7 hours...
We weren't the only ones waiting for the bus...
What an awesome walk that was!
Tomorrow back in the bus going South...
As a side story I think it's worth mentioning that on the way down we lost Lim and we found out later that not only he came to the walk with flip-flops and the bus driver told him to rent boots or he couldn't do the walk. Then it turned out he didn't bring any food whatsoever (we didn't know that at the time) so after the hellish descend from Mount Doom he was starving and feeling really weak so he ended up begging a women that was passing by for some food.
She probably saw the state of him and felt merciful because she ended up giving him a chocolate bar and that's all he ate in 9 and half hours because that's what took him to complete the course.
He took about 20 pictures on the way up...(first 2 hours of the walk) and 2 pictures for the rest of the 7 hours of the walk...
I'm still amazed he managed to complete the walk with no food and only 2 litres of water... that must have felt like a severe punishment for something he must have done in his previous life!
Now when he told us the story we all laughed about it but I can only imagine the pain he was in for so many hours
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