Welcome to our new website! our old one was full so here we are.....

Our last entry was from our last stop at lake taupo (our skydive) Next we moved down to Tongariro National Park. This is a famous national park where they did a lot of filming for the lord of the rings film, and you could see why! we stayed in a lovely hostel in a town close by and got a shuttle bus to the national park early in the morning to start our 18km walk over the volcanoes!! the walk was very steep and difficult on the way up, we got to 1900meters high and were above the clouds. There are two big volcanoes we passed and Mt Ngauruhoe was the most spectactular, we started the walk with just the tip of the volcanoe in the distance and walked so we were right next to it. The scenery was very baron and lords of the rings type, there were some beautiful lakes though called the emerald lakes (amazing colours!) and blue lake.  The earth up there was so warm and great for putting your hands in to warm them up! The walk is supposed to take up to 8 hours but we managed it in 6h45m which was pretty good going we thought! but boy did we ache the next few days....