Tongariro Crossingish! Or: my night in a Sauna.

This weekend's trip was to take us to the Tongariro Crossing. It's one of the World's foremost day hikes, and I had been looking forward to doing it for a very long time.

We had hatched the idea only a few days before, but everybody (Myself, Ben, Erika, Meg, and Tim) were all quite . . . ahem. . . keen on actually attempting the hike. There were only a few problems: We didn't know where to stay; we didn't know how to get there once we figured out where we were going to stay; and, well, that's about it. Luckily for us, Tim has a car, he's an experienced tramper, and he knew how to get there. Problems solved. Or so we thought.

Well, about two days before we were slated to part on our epic adventure, he experienced one of his infrequently occurring migraines that stay with him for a couple of weeks whenever he has a lapse. This effectively put us back to square one. So I did something that I'm quite good at doing; I delegated the responsibility of the trip to others. So Ben rented a car and Erika found us a place to stay. Damn, I'm good.

Then Saturday finally came and Ben and I went to go pick up our lime. I mean car. I get them confused sometime. And, thus, armed with a Hulk-in-miniature, we returned to Massey, picked up our two comrades in arms, and set out for bold new areas. But first we bought food. It is hard, after all, to set out for bold new adventures on an empty stomach. Yeah. Oh, while I was there, I saw this:

I'm kinda titchy about what the other "meat" is. Anyways, we bought our food for the trip, and scarcely three hours later we finally came in view of Mt. Ruapehu and Mt. Ngauruhoe, the two mountains that the Tongariro Crossing, well, crosses through. And, now that I'd finally seen what the mountains looked like face-to-face, I was finally getting really jazzed for the hike. But, unfortunately, it's a 7-9 hour hike, so we couldn't really start it when we finally got there on Saturday. Sadness.



So instead we elected to check into our hostel, EXTREME BACKPACKERS (I'm sorry, but you just can't say a name like that any other way), which was pretty cool; it had a climbing wall contiguous to our accommodation, but, unfortunately, I couldn't talk anybody else into climbing.

Ben, as usual, being entirely helpful and pointing at. . . something.

So we decided that (since my earlier attempts had all been foiled due to availability of tickets) we would drive to Taupo to see the new Pirates movie.

Our Timing was simply amazing, after feeling like we got lost, we lucked into finding the Cinema, and, just as we got in, they had started selling tickets to a showing of the movie that was going to be in about ten minutes time. Awesome. So we bought tickets, Ben and I waded through the sea of other viewers, and I placed my flag in the last four contiguous seats in the theater. Then, since the girls were hungry, we proceeded to guard our closely held seats from the other ravenous fans. This was no easy task, mind you, but somehow we held out until the girls finally returned with popcorn and soda.

You know, I rather liked the movie. Yes, there were times that it was obviously dumb or melodramatic, but on the whole it was a damn fine sendoff for the series, and I was happy for it. Oh, and can anybody possibly explain to me the purpose of even putting in Calypso into the movie? From what I saw, she was a totally useless character, and could easily have remained the Obeah charmer. Still though, YEARRRGH!

Flushed with success, we ate dinner at Hell . . . 's Pizza parlor,

Me, Ben, and Erika after having consumed a Meat Pizza and the ever-bizzare Cream Cheese and Salmon pizza. Yep, yummy. One guess as to which one I ordered.

Ben and Meg, posing after consuming inordinate amounts of pizza.

We then had an ice cream cone at McD's, and returned to our EXTREME hostel.

(In some clinical experiments, the hamster has merely stared, befuddled, when given the choice as to an entry point into the maze.)

Now, anybody that knows me knows that I don't get cold. If I'm cold, then either it's sub-zero temperatures or I'm excessively sick. On the other hand, I'm quite aware that this isn't the case for everybody, and I'm more than willing to accommodate the needs of others.

So when the girls said that they wanted to turn on the space heater because they were cold, I had no problem with that. Also, anybody that knows me knows that it takes a long time for me to actually get to sleep; once I'm there nothing short of nuclear holocaust can move me, but getting to that state takes a lot of time. So I began the night warming up to a comfortable temperature in my sleeping bag. It was nice, and before I was really going to drift off, I noticed that the room was becoming pretty hot. I layed on my back for a while, pondering this new development as I noticed that the room was actually getting pretty stifling inside my sleeping bag. So I sweated inside my sleeping bag for probably a half-hour before I finally decided that they could just wake up when I unzipped my sleeping bag and put it to the side of my bed. Now the room was at a comfortable temperature again. And, also again, just as I was about to fall asleep I noticed that the room seemed to be getting warmer again. But the girls liked the room when it was warmer, right? So, there was no need to make them uncomfortable by noisily getting down from the upper bunk and noisily turning off their source of hear, right? But I was getting really hot, sweating in my boxers, with no covers on whatsoever. But I didn't want to turn off the heater if they didn't want that. And so the argument went in my head from approximately 1:00 in the morning to 5:00 in the morningish when I finally drifted off to a fitful slumber in our little sauna.

Anyways, after showering at 6:3o when I woke up in preparation for the bus we were going to take, I said something to the effect of "My god you guys, you made this room a bloody sauna last night." And, to my chagrin, everybody agreed. It turns out that the argument that I was having with myself was shared by everybody in that room for most of the night. Nobody wanted to turn the heater off for fear of offending one of the other people in the room. So we all spent an entire night in a freaking sauna! Seriously, I woke up dehydrated because I had lost so much water that night. It was that bad. We are bloody geniuses.

And, on that tantalizing note, I leave you all for today. I'll set another update your way soon with our story of the crossed-crossing. Sounds like a Sherlock Holmes story, eh?