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Showing posts with the label tramping in New Zealand

Photo Friday: Tongariro National Park, New Zealand

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Yes, I know, Photo Friday is happening on Saturday this week. I've been very busy writing that new novel! This will probably be the last of the reports from New Zealand, freeing me to start in on the travels we've done in the US since returning! As we made our way up the North Island to meet our flight home from Aukland, we were able to explore one of the most striking New Zealand landscapes: Tongariro National Park. Picking just enough photos for a blog post was very, very hard. New Zealand's oldest National Park, Tongariro is also a World Heritage site preserving Maori culture. We would look into some of that later. For our time in the park, we merely tried to be sensitive about hiking around a mountain sacred to the Maori people (Ngauruhoe). The Tongariro Northern Circuit, most of which we hiked, starts out between Ruapehu and Ngauruhoe, and circles the latter. Part of the hike, along the northern side of Ngauruhoe, is also part of the insanely popular Tongariro Crossing

Photo Friday Comes on Monday: Taranaki

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The latest installment in my reports of our adventures over the last year. This is part of the 4 months we spent in New Zealand (January through most of April) this year. We spent most of the time on the South Island, and I've covered most of our outings there. This is a trip my husband and I did on North Island, after our son went back to the US to finish his final term of college. Mt. Taranaki is the primary feature of Egmont National Park (est. 1900). Named Taranaki by the Maori, and Egmont by Captain Cook, the mountain is a perfect cone, at least from a little distance, reminiscent of Mt. Fuji. We arrived on a drizzly morning, driving out of decently fair conditions down below into the cloud that shrouded the mountain from a few hundred feet below the Visitor's Center. We had toyed with the idea of climbing the mountain, but the dubious weather combined with the 5000' climb (and descent) put us off it. Instead, we chose to hike the Pouakai Circuit, a loop along the base

Photo Friday: The Milford Track

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After driving the long way around from Christchurch to Te Anau (documented here and here ), We launched into the 3-night, 4 day, 33 1/2 mile Milford Track tramp. Possibly the most famous track in New Zealand, this requires a lot of planning and advance booking--a year or more in advance. In fact, we had intended to do it first thing back in January, but a tiny delay in booking the huts meant we got late February instead. As it happened, that was a good thing: the January attempt by others in our party was rained out, while we enjoyed fine weather, at least where it mattered. The participants were my husband, Eldest Son, Friend B, and myself.  The trip begins with an hour's boat ride up Lake Ta Anau; the start of the Milford Track isn't accessible by road (neither is the end, come to think of it). There are two or three boats per day; we were on the last boat, which was well-filled with those who would become our fellow trampers. A note on that: many of the Great Walks in New Z