The Story of the Star-Crossed Crossing.

Even after having spent the entire night in a sauna, I was more than ready to tackle the Tongariro Crossing upon waking up. I can't say the same for the others:

Erika's Brandt-this-is-too-damn-early-for-pictures face.

Meg's not tired. She just has a little something in her eyes. . .

I just love irritating people when they're too tired to fight back. This picture is an example.

Either they're attempting to communicate via telepathy, or this is one hell of a staring contest.

In fact, as sometimes happens, I was the perkiest one in the morning. Bah, coffee's for losers and people from Seattle. Not that there's always a distinct line between the two. Ooh, sorry, I hereby extend my humblest apologies to Seatllites everywhere. Interesting fact: Where I'm staying right now, Palmerston North, supposedly gets more rainy days on average than Seattle.

Ooookay, back to topic. So, since the crossing takes about 7-9 hours to complete in one direction, for lazy Americans it's almost necessary to hire out a bus to drive our lazy asses either from one end of the track to the other, or to and from a hostel. Knowing this, the night before we had booked a bus to come and pick us up at one end of the track in the morning and drive us to the other end. That way we could be lazy, hike the track one direction to our car and then drive home. Hooray for good old-fashioned American laziness!

So, in order for us to actually take this plan to fruition, we had to get up excessively early, feign perkiness, and get to the car park at one end by 7:30 AM. Anyways, after a small snafu (the person who had given us directions gave us somewhat misleading directions, oh, and the sign telling us where to go was also really, really small. Thank God for my eagle-eye vision. . . ) we finally arrived at the car park as was arranged by our hostel. We arrived to find. . . no bus. And, 30 minutes later it was still noticeably lacking. Piqued, we (Ben and Erika) called our hostel and the bus service to see what was up. Well, as Butko luck would have it, the weather forecast predicted some showers and excessive wind up on the mountains, effectively cancelling any hope we had of actually doing the hike this weekend. Sadness.

Disillusioned with the world and disheartened in the willful sprites of weather, we returned to the Turangi isite (and we went back to our hostel for a refund of the bus-tickets) reconnoitered with the natives, and learned of a couple of other walks that we could do. We ended up doing two 2.5 hour hikes, the first one to Rotopounamu lake.

It was a cute walk, we talked amongst each other, venting our respective angst against a precarious weather god, and had an all around good time.
In tribute to the Pirates movie of the night before, I made a sand skull and cross twig-bones. While a few of the others became tree huggers. The only thing that actually made this hike unique and slightly awesome was the fact that the water on the lake was prone to waterspouts. I think it's because of the situation of the lake in a valley and the high winds that we had that day, forcing the wind in a circle and thereby making waterspouts. If you look closely in the picture, you can see a waterspout in the leftmost portion of the picture. Ben's face at the exact moment where he realized that getting to the end of the jutting tree is only half of the trip.

Anyways, we finished that social little walk and drove on a little ways to begin our next excursion. Unlike the first tramp, this second tramp had a lot of things about it that was unique and completely awesome:

Firstly, the view of Mount Ngauruhoe was staggering. Oh, and for those of you who have yet to figure it out from the pictures, Mt. Ngauruhoe is MOUNT DOOM! Gleeberries!

Oh, and it was also a hike to a waterfall, which was pretty cool. Not only because all waterfalls are cool, but also because you could hike right to the edge of the rock where the waterfall falls from. For those of you who don't know, I have a fear of heights. This may seem contradictory due to my love of climbing rocks and trees, but for some reason, that's totally different in my mind to just walking up to the edge of a cliff and looking down. My phobia is so strong that I can't even watch my friends standing at the edge of the cliff without feeling like I have a pull them back from the edge. I don't understand it, that's just the way it is with me. So just understand how hard it was for me to take this pictures:

Looks normal on the surface, right? Well, other than Mt. Doom looming in the background.

Wrong, they were actually sitting in the middle of this picture when I took the other picture.

Other than the whole, "wow, this is really high up here, I'm gonna go and hide in a corner" part, the waterfall was pretty awesome. We hiked around it and took lots of random pictures.

I took this picture behind the water falls. It doesn't actually show anything cool, I really just liked the picture.

Another view of Mt. Ruapehu.

With that, the hiking day was effectively over. We were still bummed that we couldn't do the Crossing, but the subsequent walking helped to somewhat lessen the wound. Ben tossed me the car keys, and I got behind the wheel of a car again. Only now, that I've reached the ripe old age of 21, do I see the allure in road trips. 'Tis somewhat of a rush, exploring new places with nowhere to be and nobody to answer to. Needless to say then, I had a great time just driving home. Of course, there had to be a few pit-stops now and then, didn't there?

This one was for a small bite of a very large vege. (yeah, that's how they spell "Veggie" over here. It's messed me up to no end.) Our final stop before heading back to "balmy" Palmy was to sit in an airplane cafe and eat a very large cookie. Of course. Who wouldn't do that? Well, besides the yawning Ben. Ignore that.

So, while I'm sad that we didn't actually get the opportunity to do the Tongariro Crossing, the trip was awesome nonetheless. Ahhhh, good times. Next weekend should be fun; I'm going to Sydney!