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7 March
Our accomodation for this night was the Blue Duck Station. It is located in Whakahoro, which is a very big national park in New-Zealand. There was a wide range of activities available like horse riding, clay shooting and goat hunting. Not one of those seemed appealing to me so I went to run to a waterfall and swim there. The water was freezing cold! Everyone thought that I was crazy to go in there, but at least I got some nice pictures.
8 March
8 March is a special day.. I can say that I conquered Mount Doom of the Lord of the Rings. The real name is Mount Ngauruhoe and the mountain is 2287 meters high. We started at a carpark at an altitude of 1100 meters. The track is called the Tongariro Alpine Crossing and is one of the most famous one day walks. The bus should leave at 5 pm and there were 2 choices. The first was mount Doom, which was obviously the most difficult hike and the second one was to see the Blue Lake (1886 metres). Because the bus was leaving at 5 pm already, they said you could only do 1 of the 2 hikes. I did the hiking together with Simon from Switserland and we chose to climb to the top of mount Doom. It was a real fight to get to the top of the mountain, the mountain was really steep and every 2 steps you took, you would slip down one and a half step. We started at 10 am and were on the top of the mountain at 1.30 pm. The view from the top was really rewarding and it felt good to conquer the mountain. We still had to go down though and this job was just as hard because of all the rocks that were slipping down once you stept on it. After a while we got used to it and slided down on the mountain like we were snowboarding. We fell several times and I still have to remove a couple of small stones which got under the skin of my hand. When we were at the bottom of mount doom again, it was 2.30. We decided to go to the Blue lake as well, but we had to be really fast, because the bus would leave at 5. We decided to do the most of the hiking running and we saw a lot of people from our group walking back from the lagoon already. They all thought we were crazy and we couldn't make it on time. We made it to the top and the view was beautiful again, so it was totally worth it. After descending quickly we got to the bus at 4.40 pm and we got a very well-deserved beer after almost 7 hours of hiking. In the evening we went into to hot tub of the jacuzzi to relax our body.
9 March
This was the last day on the north island of New Zealand, the last stop was Wellington. Wellington is the hometown of Peter Jackson, the director of the Lord of the Rings movies, and a lot of scenes of the movies are made around the area of this city. First I went to the Te Papa
museum, the national museum of New Zealand together with two Dutch girls, Rianne and Myrtle. We made some delicious wraps after that, played pool and then we drunk something in the basement bar of the hostel with all the people from the bus. Tommorow morning we had to leave at 6.30 am already to go to the south island with the ferry.
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