We drove our campervan onto the ferry from Picton to Wellington bright and early. It took a few hours to cross the picturesque Malborough Sounds and then we were in the capital city of New Zealand.
A city that's not much bigger than Brighton, it didn't take us long to explore. We stayed a couple of nights in a caravan park (well, it was an expensive parking space on a tarmac carpark)a few kilometres out and took the bus in to treat ourselves to luxuries such as great coffee in a nice cafe and eating a kilo each of the local giant green mussels. As cities go, 'Welly' isn't exactly a pulsing metropolis, but it certainly had a lot more going for it than the most major town in the south, Christchurch.
After Wellington, we travelled several hours up the east coast to the town of Napier. An earthquake in 1931 completely flattened the town and surrounding area and nearly everything was rebuilt in the fashionable style of the time - Art Deco. A massive fan of this design era, I had been particularly excited about this part of the North Island and I wasn't disappointed.
The main town has an amazing collection of buildings, all in pristine condition. We took a self-guided walking tour around one of the suburbs, where local people live in streets full of houses that I would give my right arm for. Unfortunately, some residents obviously didn't fully appreciate their properties and felt that six foot corrugated iron fences and big boxy cement garages complemented their houses - sights which roused the dormant town planner in Ben.
Tongariro National Park was our next stop, via lunch at Lake Taupo. This national park is home to the volcano which features as Mount Doom in the Lord of the Rings films, as well as several other impressive peaks.
We embarked on a full-day trek known as the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, which is 19km up mountains, across and round volcanic craters, and through forest. The blue sky and warm sunshine at the foot of the mountains was misleading because at 2000 metres high the rain came down in icy sidewinds and the visibility was pretty poor. This added to the already challenging ascent and descent of the summit, through unstable volcanic ash and stones, which apparently causes hikers to come a-cropper regularly. When wearing shorts in lashing rain became ridiculous, we tried to hide behind a big rock to change into our thermals. Hopefully other hikers were too concerned with their own progress to notice Ben and I standing in our undercrackers, shrouded in fog at the top of a volcano.
Nevertheless it was great experience at a difficulty we hadn't experienced before and we felt it was probably a good training exercise for the impending Inca Trail.
