the road to mordor

First off, Happy New Year everyone (if anyone is still reading - not sure cause you lazy bastards aren't commenting!). I've fallen a bit behind on this thing because decent internet access has been surprising hard to come by in New Zealand - it was faster in Laos! Anyway...

On Friday Maya and I left Rotorua, feeling a little underwhelmed and a lot poorer financially (shit is so expensive in New Zealand that it's almost inevitable that we'll end up feeling ripped off); we drove about 3 hours south to Tongariro National Park where we planned to take on the Tongariro Crossing, a 17-kilometer (about 11-mile) hike that usually takes at least 7 hours to complete, and which, I just found out a second ago, actually had two people die on it last year. Basically, it's no relaxing stroll along the beach, and while Maya and I have some serious hiking under our belts - we made a 7-hour climb halfway down and back up the Grand Canyon last year - we're not exactly what you'd consider to be the outdoorsy, trekking types, so we (particularly Maya) were a little nervous going in. Our trepidation wasn't helped by the fact that we had booked only one full day (the next day, Saturday) in the area so we were praying for the weather to be on our side, and yet, as we drove through the National Park to our guesthouse, we found ourselves in an absolutely torrential downpour. Then as we arrived at our accomodations, an attractively rustic-looking ski lodge, we saw the hikers who had been stuck on the trail during the rain returning from their trek, and they looked miserable, all drenched from head to foot, covered in mud, and limping.

That night we packed our backpacks - with multiple layers of cloths, snacks, lots of water - and went to bed around 10:30 - the shuttle driving us to the head of the trail left at 7:30am the next morning and we had breakfast before that at 7, so we set our alarm for 6. Now, you should know that Maya has had an issue for most of our trip - the night preceding any activity that you would really want solid rest before (like, when we hiked the unrestored Great Wall), she hasn't been able to sleep. And such was the case that night. Even with the help of two pills and earplugs, when the alarm started beeping at 6am, Maya had only gotten a few winks of rest, and she was fucking pissed. "I'm not going to do it!" she said quite for a few times of the Crossing, "I can't do it." But while Maya can whine, pout, and scream with the best of them, when push comes to shove, she's pretty fucking badass, and when she finally calmed down, stepped into the hallway, which was freezing cold, and was shocked into awakedness by a cold blast of outside air, she decide to go for it.

Good thing we did, because the weather ended up being perfect, and Tongiriro Crossing ended up being possibly the most amazing hike we've gone on anywhere. We climbed through Martian-looking plains...

...up crumbly lava flows, past snow-capped peaks...

...above the rather vaginal "Red Crater"...

...right to the banks of surreally colored mountain-top mineral lakes...


...and to the side of the active volcano Mount Ngauruhoe. I think I said of the Great Wall of China that it seemed like something out of The Lord of the Rings; well, Mount Ngauruhoe literally is something of The Lord of the Rings - it was the stand-in for Mount Doom in Peter Jackson's movies.


And the long, steep, exhausting climb up the side of Ngauruhoe was the road to Mordor in the films. Like true nerds, Maya and I joked about Gollum hiding behind the corner of various crags and recited lines of Frodo and Sam's dialogue as we made our somewhat less epic and arduous journey (we finished the Crossing in just about 8 hours, including breaks for lunch and to snap hundreds of photos), feeling not unlike two little hobbits awed in the face of nature's majesty.