Onwards and Upwards...

After the joys of (the extremely) “Windy Welly”, we hit the art deco capital of NZ, Napier, after an exhaustingly long drive through gale force winds, the tightest hairpin bends in the country, and a diesel spill that went on for a good few kilometres, downhill. I also had to endure some “classic” (Keef) tunes on the Zen, as we’d decided to go through the music library by all tracks, and started randomly on P, and during the six hour drive, we had some “great” Menswear classics to name but a few. (I’m sad to say that I missed out on that great part of Britpop, damn.)

The campsite at Napier deserves a mention – not only was it massive and very clean, it had a few trampolines that we decided to play on and a jumping pillow – which is like a giant bouncy castle but without the sides. Not sure if anyone has ever been on either of the above with Keef (in recent years, at least), but I don’t recommend it – due to his slight height advantage over me, I nearly ended up over the sides of the trampoline and bounced onto my bum more than a few times.

All bounced out, we ventured into Napier itself, and it didn’t disappoint. The city was destroyed by an earthquake in the 1930’s, and as was the current fashion of the time, the city was rebuilt in an art deco style, which is more than clearly visible today. Some of the best buildings were the “Daily Telegraph” the “NFB” building and the “Masonic” building. Napier just had a really nice feel to it, everyone was super friendly, including an old lady who stopped to talk to us in the street, and ended up offering us her apartment to rent if we decided to come back.


From Napier, we headed to Lake Taupo, which is NZ’S largest lake and was formed by one of the greatest volcanic explosions of all time. It’s said that the explosion that created the crater (now occupied by the lake) was great enough to have destroyed the whole of the North Island and everything within 1000k’s was covered in poisonous ash. Taupo is so huge (606 sq km), that if you forget for a second that you’re at one of the most landlocked parts of NZ, you’d actually think you were by the sea. We visited “Hukka Falls”, which were pretty impressive (and in keeping with Keef's obsession with water falls at the moment) although these were more like a great torrent of water with giant rapids that just plunge through a rock – all the same though the water was amazingly blue considering how cloudy it was.

The following day we decided to try one of the scenic drives we’d found in our guidebook, as it took in Tongario National park, and also cause we could incorporate it into our journey to our next destination of Waitomo. To be totally honest, we hadn’t given Tongario much thought at first – NZ is abundant in national parks and we didn’t think there would be much more to see than in the others we’d visited. How wrong we were. Tongario has to be one of the most spectacular places in NZ, with 3 mighty volcanoes on display, and more importantly, two of these being used as Mordor in LOTR. The drive around was just incredible. Quite literally, out of nowhere, the first of the three volcanoes appeared – Mt Tongario, which was just awesome. When the second volcano, Mt Ngauruhoe came into sight it was obvious why Peter Jackson chose these for Mordor, in particular this one – it was exactly how you’d imagine a volcanic shape to be – it was perfect. Mt Ruapehu, the last, but by no means the least of the three came more into sight as we drove into Whakapapa (pronounced fa-ka) village, and just made our drive even more spectacular. In the village there’d been a snow fall the night before, and fresh snow on the volcanic peaks looked incredible.


We then continued our journey (rather begrudgingly after the sights of the day) to Waitomo, in search of glow worms…