The Rest of the Roadtrip

February 16: Through the fog of Mordor


We woke up this morning to less-than-stellar weather. But what do you expect when you're in the domain of Sauron? We drove to Whakapapa to catch our shuttle to the start of the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. When we found out the price of the tickets ($35/person), we briefly considered nixing the hike and finding something else nearby to do instead. Did we really want to do it in the rain? We decided to go for it, though, and in retrospect I'm glad we did. First, it was great exercise. The main hike is 19.6 km, and there are several side trails, one of which goes to the top of Mount Doom Ngauruhoe. With the amount of car-sitting we'd done recently, this was a welcome change.
Secondly, it really made us appreciate our later return journey. When we did it today, we saw very close to nothing of the landscape. The fog from last night had only increased, and the cold temperature and spots of rain hurried us along the trail. At one point, we walked around the rim of a huge lake, within a stone's throw of the water, and had no idea it was there. We also had nowhere close to good enough visibility to do the Ngauruhoe side trail. When we tried to start the side trail, we couldn't even see the mountain. And the trail starts at its base. We walked over volcanic pebbles that looked like giant peppercorns, trying to keep within view the poles that marked the trail. This was hard enough to do and we turned around. Only on our return visit did we discover that we had turned around before the steep part of the cone (most of the hike) even started, and that this section was completely unmarked. We had our lunch by the Emerald Lakes, small, smelly bodies of sulfuric water a short distance before the much larger lake that we were oblivious to.
Thirdly, the Crossing was a great chance for conversation that often doesn't happen in the car. Especially with the pervasive fog inhibiting our sightseeing, we got to spend a lot of time just talking. (And staring at the ground -- this led to a very strong optical illusion when we reached a more open area with a clearing in the fog: hills seemed to be moving perpetually away from us!)
After we finished the trek, we had to decide where to spend the night. We had to be in Auckland in two days, but the drive there was only around 6 hours. After making and subsequently cancelling a hostel reservation in Taupo, we drove on to Rotorua and booked a room at The Funky Green Voyager. This was a very fun, very communal hostel with friendly staff and backpackers from all over the world. Though we mostly kept to ourselves while we were here, there were always big, international conversations going late into the night.

February 17: The Last Day

We got a relatively late start to the day today. At 8:30, I was the first one up, but we didn't have groceries and everyone awake until past 10. At this point, the kitchen was closed for cleaning. To pass the time, we cleaned the car (which had become an organizational disaster) and packed all our belongings for easy shuttle transport. We started making breakfast at noon: I was the cook and omelets were the goal. Unfortunately, the best-sized pan for the job was cast iron, and, as I discovered, omelets don't work well in cast iron pans. What came out was a mess of egg, sausage, spinach, and a few other assorted ingredients. By no account were they in omelet form. After the first one I switched to a bigger, less sticky pan, and cooked three omelet slops at once. They tasted good enough. We finished eating somewhere around 1 and went out to explore Rotorua (or Whaingaroa, as the Maori call it).
The smell of sulfur is unavoidable in Rotorua. Walking around ranges from mildly unpleasant to very, very unpleasant. The smellier end of this scale is reached at each of the hot springs Rotorua is famous for. If you subvert your faculty of smell and explore the springs, they're really quite cool. They look like bubbling mudbaths and served, not so long ago, as natural hot tubs. I was struck by how discrete the boundaries of these springs were; despite the fact that they're spread over the whole of Rotorua (and beyond), each individual spring has a well-defined, limited area. Of course, at some point, our noses took charge and led us away from each and every spring we encountered.
After our circuit of the town, we returned to the FGV to get our car and drive to the nearby redwood forest. Zach tells us the trees grow three times as fast here as they do in their native California. We have lunch at 5:30 and are officially back on school schedule. After eating, we followed one of the shorter trails through the forest. The trees were magnificent. They were both incredibly tall and incredibly straight. There were also a lot of ferns growing there. While we walked, we talked about the difference between the Redwood and Sequoia National Parks in the states, General Sherman (which I had never heard of before), and the tree you can drive through. It's incredible how big these things get.
Back at the hostel we made rice and beans with venison sausages. It was a good, hearty meal, and for the first time in the whole road trip, we didn't finish it. As we went to bed that night, we were disappointed that the trip would soon be over, but excited to actually start the semester.


Morning of February 18: Turning in the Keys (or The Breaking of the Fellowship)


We got up at 7 this morning and used up the remainder of our oats on breakfast. As with the previous night, this meal proved to be too much for us. Our collective metabolism must already be settling down for the semester. We rushed to leave the hostel by 8, since we had to be at the airport in Auckland by 1:30. Characteristically, I slept through most of the drive. We topped off our petrol ("gas" = "petrol") twice before returning the car. As we pulled into the Apex carpark at 11:40, our odometer reached 6001.5 km. We'd been hoping to top 6000, and we just made it! One fewer wrong turn and we would have missed the mark. In case you were wondering, our preferred units for this accomplishment are megameters (6) and albatross days (3 (did you know an albatross can fly 2000 km a day?)). A shuttle took us to the airport where we met our AU contacts. We were (quite) early, though this didn't cause nearly as much of an inconvenience to us as our contact suggested when we arrived. The next wave of students arrived on schedule a few minutes later, and we just rode the Super Shuttle with them to our housing (Though we didn't interact with any of those three other students, one of them was named Paco. He turned out to be quite a good rock climber, joining the climbing club and recruiting a friend here to join as well. That friend was the photographer who took the picture currently on my facebook profile). We split up for the first time at the end of this ride; Wes went to Parnell, the rest of us to Wellesley Student Apartments. It was time to start the semester.

Mount Doom

February 15

I woke up this morning to the sound of Ian stirring. It was about a quarter to 9 and I got out of bed a few minutes after he did. I brought my netbook into the living room to blog, happy to find Kate in her pajamas and the German couple just starting breakfast; no one in the house had gotten an early start this morning. Our plan was to go back to the conveniece store this morning to get pancake mix, eggs, and possibly ice cream (we had a craving for ice cream after dinner last night but none of the stores were open. Wes suggested having it on pancakes for breakfast). Ian and I decided that this was a good time to pick everything up, so we drove into town together. We found eggs and syrup easily enough, but it took us some time to pin down the pancake mix. We were looking for the standard cardboard boxes, but 4 Square (the big New Zealand grocery chain) only sold pancake mix in a container about the size and shape of a large plastic syrup bottle. It's a just-add-water job and the powdery mix leaves enough space in the bottle to pour the water straight in, no mixing bowl required. This turned out to be a most convenient way of doing things, and none of us could find flaw with the final product.

We returned to find Kate smoking outside on the patio. She caught us immediately.

“So you bought your ice cream after all. Better late than never I suppose?”

“Haha, yeah. Better late than never,” we replied.

“You're not seriously going to eat that for breakfast are you?”

We mumbled a sheepish response as we went inside. We did eat it for breakfast and it was the tastiest start to the day I can remember in a long time. The final meal was about five pancakes each, three eggs (I poached mine, the rest were fried), and more french vanilla ice cream than we had a prayer of getting through.

“What would your mothers think?” Kate wondered. She tells us she has been reminding herself more and more of her mother, especially with her guests that stay for several weeks.

“ 'Eat your veggies! It's no wonder you're getting sick,' ” she has caught herself saying before. She is an interesting woman. She describes her choice not to have children as “very different” from her mother. She runs this homestay and apparently sells wine, but we don't know what it is she does with her time when she's away from Evony. She seems to be passively outgoing – interacting with hundreds of strangers, but only when they wander to her doorstep. It took us about another hour to get packed up and ready to leave her home, and before none of our trips to the car did she ask us for our fee. She even gave us a couple of gas canisters for our stove before we left. As we rounded up our money (among ourselves and still, incredibly, unbidden) we decided we had very much been given the right price for the night. Discounting the price of the gas, our luxurious homestay was no more expensive than a hostel. We paid up and asked Kate which of the many wineries in town she recommended. Her choice was the simply named Martinsborough Vineyard, just around the corner.

The vineyard was small; they didn't offer tours, but they did do tastings. I figured I would enjoy it the least and offered to drive and let Zach, Wes, and Ian try the wine. As they received their sequence of sips (white to red, each with winemaker's notes) I ambled around the room looking at the various pictures, posters, and prizes hanging on the wall. Martinsborough Vineyard is quite proud of its Pinot Noir, which in 1997 won the title of best in the world at a competition in London. The Pinot Noir is the last wine in the tasting and while the woman behind the counter poured it she informed us that it (this batch, at least) sells for $70/bottle. The guys reported liking all the wines, but not being particularly impressed by any. Ian wondered how objectively wine could be judged, especially to earn a "best in the world" distinction. We left, mostly feeling out of place. We were American twenty-somethings wearing very casual clothing, with no intention of buying any wine. The people we saw while we were there were much older, wearing nice suits, and prefectly happy tossing out a few hundred dollars for fine wines.

We got in the car and braced ourselves for a long drive. It was not quite noon. The two breaks we took on the road were for groceries at Pak n Save and lunch/bathroom on the side of the road. As we drove after lunch, Zach received a text from Eric back at WashU saying we needed to figure out housing by tomorrow. Unfortunately, the text had been sent yesterday. Figuring we had very little time, we called him and had a trans-continental housing meeting. Alison even participated stateside. It was quite the affair. We figured out what we wanted them to apply for (we had left partially-filled applications in St Louis) and, pleased with our timeliness, continued toward Tongariro National Park.

This park was the filming location for Mordor, and Mount Ngauruhoe, one of the three primary peaks, was used for none other than MOUNT DOOM! We were looking for it as we drove in, Ian's guide promising that its shape was distinctive and impossible to miss. Our eyes caught on a view something like this (none of us took a picture, to my knowledge):

Image courtesy wikipedia

"That doesn't quite look like Mount Doom..."

It was the biggest thing in sight, though. I kept looking back at it, wondering if it could actually be right. Then we saw this:

MOUNT DOOM!

This was a rather exciting discovery. There was fog coming up, seemingly straight out of the ground, that added a foreboding air to the scene. After we set up our tent at the nearby campgrounds (and I rock-hopped down another stream), we drove back within view of the ominous volcano. Here it was easy to get totally engrossed in imagining Mordor. There was little vegetation among the rocks, and that which was there looked quite unfriendly. As I explored, trying to get closer to the cone, I quickly lost all sight of the guys through the dense fog. I could imagine orcs hiding in valleys and around corners. 

I turned around when I reached a deep river valley that would take much too long to cross. Dinner would probably be ready soon. As I journeyed back, I ran into Ian. We had a brief stalking battle, throwing things at each other through the mist, before greeting each other in a more civilized way. By the time we got back to our mobile kitchen, Zach and Wes had nearly finished the chilli dogs. I wanted to take a good picture of our group with Ngauruhoe in the background before all the late was gone. That proved to be difficult, though. My SD card is unreadable and my camera won't recognize batteries (at least in picture-taking mode), Ian's camera takes one picture a day, Wes's camera doesn't recognize batteries, Zach's camera only takes a rechargeable battery, which is empty, and isn't that great of a camera anyway. We eventually gave up on the picture and turned on our headlamps to enjoy another tasty dinner in New Zealand.