This here is a bit of Mt Doom(above)
Well no that is a cloud. Mt.Doom is there somewhere though.
After Taranaki I headed back west-ish. Over Tongariro National park, home to 3 more volcanoes, including Mt. Ngaurhoe. This was the mountain that they used for Mt.Doom in the Lord of the Rings. Isn't that awesome? And I have walked on it's slopes, how cool is that? Does it take from the amazingness of that if I say I still haven't seen it though?
Yes for the entire time I was in Tongariro there was clouds over all three of the Volcanoes. I didn't actually see ANY of them. While there I also thought I would make up for my earlier laziness in tackling Taranaki. So I decided to do the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. A 19.4 kilometer mountain trek. I'm not used to walking such distances. Especially not when it's mostly uphill and pretty steep hills at that. For the first half it was a bit of a miserable affair, the aforementioned clouds were refusing to budge. Even shaking my fist vehemently at them had no effect. Luckily at about the half way point we were given a brief reprieve from the clouds. So I got to see some of the lovely scenery that the trek is famous for. It's advertised as "The best one day walk in New Zealand". It's pretty nice but I'd have to disagree. Although maybe if I had been able to see the volcanoes that might have changed my opinion. The clouds just happened to feck off everywhere else aside from the volcanoes.
