Hey! Remember these three? They went on a little road trip.
So the great thing about going abroad is doing things like 6 day weekends. We did a car relocation deal, meaning rental car companies need cars relocated to other cities, so it’s literally 0.05$ a day. Once again, the whole trip is a blur, but I’ll break it down. And, once again, a lot of these pictures were taken by Connor (thanks bro), although a few are mine.
Thursday: On the road by 3:30. The car turned out to be a manual, so that was exciting. We made it to Picton by 8pm, grabbed some food somewhere, went to an Irish bar (OMG FROZEN BAILEYS) and went to sleep.
Friday: Woke up to go get in line for the inter islander ferry…
It was a pretty fun experience. The parking area is basically like a parking garage, and then everyone heads to the upper decks, which are just like mini airport terminals and then there’s plenty of places to stand outside. The ferry took about 3 hours. Here’s a picture Connor took from the deck…
while I was lazy and eating cherries inside…
We arrived in Wellington at around 2pm, found our YHA right in the middle of town, got some food, went to the Te Papa museum…
After the museum we drove around a bit to find a parking spot and kill some time and then hit the town around 7 for the Rugby World Cup opening ceremonies and the first All Blacks game (!!!!). As you may know the World Cup was supposed to be based in Christchurch, which I now realized would have been soo sick, but it’s in Auckland now, due to the earthquakes. But Wellington has an amazing night life, so we did a lil’ pub crawl to watch the opening ceremonies (beautiful!) and the game, and we even got some drumn’bass in at some random bar. It was a great Friday night, people were everywhere, and everyone was pummpeeedddd. Which just makes me more excited for the rest of the tournament. You should watch the All Black’s haka (Tonga goes first here), it’s a necessity…
All Blacks
Saturday: We peaced out of Wellington around 10am, and spent most of the day in the Lake Taupo area. We stopped at a place near the Tongariro Crossing to inquire about doing that hike the next day. The Tongariro Crossing is known as the most popular day tramp in New Zealand, as it is fairly challenging and has beautiful views. It is also the site of Mt. Doom from Lord of the Rings, if that means anything to you. The lady said the weather was supposed to be really crappy, which we knew, but that a group had gone up that day and she said to check back to see what we needed to rent for tomorrow. At the end of the day, we heard that they didn’t think we needed crampons and axes, but they did take walking poles. Of course, we thought we didn’t need walking poles and that we would try to get as far as possible with the weather, even though all tours were cancelled because of wind and snow/rain. See where this is going yet?
We spent a lot of Saturday driving around the area, which is really pretty…
We went to a really cool waterfall…
And here’s the lake at sunset…
That night we camped in a perfect little hobo spot in Tongariro’s national park, and woke up to a marble-like cloudy sky. September 11th! My birthday! But there was no time to fret about turning 20, as we had a serious hike before us. Long story short, we made it to the summit around 11am I think. The hike up was pretty challenging, lots of stairs, and it was rainy and windy.
Once we neared the top we understood why you would need crampons and axes. We had to climb on all fours up a few slopes and brace ourselves whenever a huge gust of wind would threaten to knock us over the edge (there were long icey slopes on either side of us). Although it was nice to be at the summit, the weather was shit, so we couldn’t see anything, and so we started down right away, espeically since the weather was getting worse.
Tongariro Vid
Again, long story short, we end up at a mysterious hut and realize we’d gone an hour out of our way. All of which had been downhill. As the wind picked up and the rain increased we realized we were going to have to climb BACK UP THE FREEZING COLD WINDY MOUNTAIN ICY SIDE WITH SNOW AND HAIL AND PAINFUL AND DIFFICULT HIKING RAINY LOST NOOOO OMG. Those words didn’t make sense, but that was pretty much what was going on inside my head. The next hour was filled with the hardest hiking ever, and several times I was choking back tears because of
a) how cold I was
b) how tired I was and how much further we had to go
c) we were slightly lost
d) how freaking hard the hike was
e) I was 20
Once we re-reached the summit we had to find the trail, of course at this point the top of the crossing was a complete white out and we couldn’t see anything. Sam some how found some of the magical adrenaline strength where people lift cars and shit and RAN up a slope and spotted some tracks for us to follow. CooooooOOOOoool. Tracks. There had been trail markers every 10 meters and now we’re going to follow tracks? We walked for about 3-5 minutes without finding a pole, each of us thinking our own thoughts. Images of death and losing fingers and helicopters and newspaper headlines (“THREE AMERICANS FREEZE TO DEATH BECAUSE THEY’RE IDIOTS”) were flashing through our heads, and although we found a trail marker, the hike was really hard and cold and windy and miserable and treacherous for the next hour or so. I didn’t think I was going to laugh for the next 2 days, but once we got out of the blizzard we looked at each other and actually laughed. Then we went to the best Indian restaurant in the entire world, had a birthday beer, and fell asleep. I don’t know if I can say that we almost died, but we could have died. Yayyy 20. I’m alive!
Side note: I’m really relieved I wasn’t in the U.S. for the lovely 10th anniversary. Sounds like it was filled with tons of news coverage and specials. Oh 9/11…you’re quite the day for a birthday.
Monday: Mount Maunganui…
Driving…
Driving vid
Dropped Sam off Monday afternoon. We stayed at the Jucy Hotel. Jucy is this hilarious car rental place where we’ve rented from each time (and apparently they have a hotel too). They always give us nice aquamarien cars that are pretty crappy, but the add to the experience. Jucy also has this great thing going where they use sex appeal to sell rental cars. Mostly everyone who rents from Jucy is 20 something and pretty broke. And all the people who work there are pretty attractive and probably don’t know too much about cars…
Auckland was rainy, busy, and excited for the games…
(again, stolen from Connor's facebook)
Tuesday: Connor left at around 8am, I got on a bus around 11am, was totally that American eating McDonalds in the airport (Kiwi Burger: pattie+cheese+egg+beetroot ohhh yess), and made it home around 2pm.
A memorable trip to say the least.