ROTORUA - Christmas in Mordor with Tom Cruise

New Zealand is a great place to be for the budget minded (read: tight fisted) traveller who wants to hang around during the height of the holiday season and not spend too much money. For Christmas Day, Bronwyn decided we should go off to her favourite NZ mountain, Mt. Taranaki for my favourite free activity: walking. And boy, did we walk...


Dawson's Falls, Mount Taranaki. All together now: I don't want to wait, for this life to be over. I want to know right now, will it be...

Taranaki has the dual pleasures of being a beautiful single peaked mountain in the middle of open countryside and bearing more than a passing resemblance to Mount Fiji, Japan. Both of which made it an appealing film set for the not-so-epic Tom Cruise pout-a-thon The Last Samaruai a few years back. Apparently there are still pieces of the samaurai village the production team built for the occassion lying around the countryside somewhere (as there are pieces of Hobbiton stuck in the hillside at Matamata a few hundred kilometres north) but it seemed like a pointless excercise to go look at rotting wood from a rottern film (sorry, Tom) so instead we headed up to a lodge in the lovely area of Dawson's Falls for Christmas Eve night.


Brosnan parked outside Konini Lodge, and our view of Taranaki for Christmas morning. Beats a grey street in Dorset, I think. Although it was still jolly cold.

Christmas morning arrived without any visits from Santa Claus, but plenty of freezing lodge conditions to convince the Aussies that they needed to put on their entire set of thermal gear before heading at the door. Wiser birds, used to British housing, know that it's always warmer *outside* than in. So another ten minutes of stripping off later and we were off. Our plan was to cross the mountain streams and ascend to the snow line of the mountain, cross over some of the ski fields and walk a ridge called the Razorback to descend to the next visitor's centre around the mountain before heading home. It was a good plan and well made. Unfortunatley, it was made without due consideration of those little contour lines you usually find on maps.


Mountain stream at Taranaki. Seeing as this is the film themed posting I think I'll conduct the rest of these captions with quotes from The Last Samaurai and The Lord of the Rings. Okay, so here come those great, famous, Last Samurai quotes... Ummm...

The track home from North Egmont turned out to be a little rougher than we were expecting. A thirteen kilometere hike up and down the mighty mountain ridges. In itself, not a issue. However, the lower round the mountain path at Taranki isn't quite so well travelled as the upper ones. And as such, it's pretty much a stepless set of vertical climbs up and down with occassional ladders thrown in just to make everyone feel better. And after a twelve kilometere hike already... Well, it was going to be a long way home...


"I feel the need. The need, for samurai!" No, wait, that wasn't one. Anyho, here's a nice picture of the Aussies on one of the Taranki ridges. Which also presented marvellous views like...


... This one, out towards Tongariro National Park and, jutting through the clouds in the distance, Mt. Ruapehu. More on that later.

Thankfully I was being accompnied by Aussies who, among their many talents, are completley indestructable. Pelt them with sun, rain and even sleet and snow (Taranaki is the place to go for random weather) and they still keep trucking so much so that we covered one four hour section in less than three. Gotta love it. After the first four kilometres home, I was getting pretty tried. After the next four, I thought I was going to probably die. Two later and I pretty much assumed I *was* dead, which was probably how I managed to drag myself over the world's least confidence inspiring bridge just a few short hours from Dawson's Creek:


Seriously, Kiwis, do you ever go back to mantain these things once you stick them up?

But we made it. Aching joints and stubbed toes aplenty. In time for our fabulous Christmas dinner of Burritos and as many chips and sweet potatoes as we could consume. All in all, a fabulous, if compeltley exhausting Christmas Day. We rewarded ourselves with a day's rest on Boxing Day and a quick drive to Turangi, the self proclaimed trout fishing capital of the world. And then, to Mordor.


Ah, now *these* quotes I can do. Let's begin with: "Mooooorrrrdoooorrrr!"

One of the advantages of filming The Lord of the Rings in a country like New Zealand is that, when one reaches the final film and realises a bleak, desolate volcanic landscape is required, there just happens to be a bleak, desolate volcanic landscape in the centre of the North Island. The Tongariro National Park encompases three active volcanoes. The ickle Tongariro itself. The massive, multi peaked Mt. Ruapehu and the impressive single coned Ngauruhoe. The latter two were both utilised in some way to create the iconic Mount Doom in the film trilogy, with Rhapehu's slopes giving way to Ngauruhoe's peak. And very impressive they both are to walk around, too.


"My precious!.... etc. etc.

The premiere walk of choice in the park is the one day Tongariro Crossing. A seventeen kilometre hike encompassing scrublands at the base of Ngauruhoe, followed by a dizzying climb up to its base, desolate hours of walking and climbing its awesome Red Crater, followed by a slow descent through more plains to alpine scrub, hot springs and eventually lush bush. It's one of the world's great one day walks through sheer variety of landscape, and attracts hundreds of nutcases a day who want to climb for two hours for those coverted photos and aching thighs. Note, for example, the Devil's Staircase. Gollum, Sam and Frodo never had it this tough:


"Up, up, up the stairs..."

At this point the Aussies decided they hadn't caused themselves enough physical pain in the past few days and headed off to summit the scree sloped Ngauruhoe. I, not being a fan of 'two steps forward, one step back' climbing and knowing from Lord of the Rings that Mount Doom can be hazardous to one's fingers (Bronwyn scraped all the skin off the top of hers) decided to push on to the next crater climb.


"One does not simply walk into Morder... How about a catapault?"

After the crazy conditions and distances travelled at Taranki, a perfect day's conditions in Tongariro presented few problems. After reuniting with the Aussies at the Emerald Lakes we headed for our last climb and the downhill trek back to ground level.


"Nothing ever dampens your spirit, does it, Sam?"

The Tongariro Crossing is billed as a six hour walk. At Aussie speed, it takes five although wiser birds might want to take a little more time on the ridges. Oh, and let's not forget the two and a half hour side scramble they decided to take... Crazy people... But whatever your level of fitness or madness, it's heartily recommended.

For our final stint in Tongariro, we took a quick janut up to the Whakapapa Ski Fields, where the Last Allience fought their impressive and very brown battle at the start of The Fellowship of the Ring and where Gollum first tangled with Sam and Frodo in The Two Towers. It's a big area covered with rock. And if it's not covered in rock, it's covered in snow. Typical New Zealand mountain, really.


"He's a nasty, fat hobbit!"

And so that was our Christmas season. And we did all eventually get presents from New Zealand. Chris got a badly stubbed toe, Bronwyn's finger and a recurrance of an old gymnastics injury and me an irritatingly aching right knee. Still, it could always have been worse. Nobody lost a finger. Or a ring.


"This is your test..." Okay, I've got them all out of my system, now. And I didn't even have to use that 'beautiful and terrible as the dawn' one.