April 4: Tongariro National Park

Previously: April 3

Surprisingly, we both woke this morning able to walk. So we made plans to go out for a cooked breakfast, get some breakfast supplies for future self-catering, and then spend the day doing light hiking around Whackapapa. This follows the philosophy of “hair of the dog that bit you”, or perhaps it’s just unacknowleged masochism that drove us back out to climb more hills.

We stayed in bed late (for us), emerging from beneath the duvet around 8 to repack our bags for a day of hiking. Given that we weren’t going to be more than an hour or so from the car and would be walking at lower elevations, we didn’t need to pack as much gear, so we shifted the essentials into our small daypacks. As we’d largely run out of food supplies, we opted for having someone else cook breakfast, and went to the Station Café, which is the only place open early—one of only a literal handful of places to eat, which is weird given the number of tourists who come here during high season. You'd expect many restaurants to cater to the peak tourist influx, but that's not the case. The Café’s located next to one of the few train tracks we’ve seen in our travels. Rather than a North American breakfast, we opted for English-style pies, though baked as we waited and served by a Chinese couple. We split a lamb and pea pie and a pork and sweet chili pie. Both were good, but not as good as those we had at the Landing, which is the Thai restaurant back in Opononi. We went in search of a nearby place called the Alpine Hotel, which our host at Schnapp’s had suggested might sell fresh bread, but sadly, they were closed. Bakeries where you can buy a decent loaf of non-mass-produced bread seem rare, in our experience.

A quick stop at the local 4-Square, which is the local equivalent of a 7/11 or local dépanneur to get bread, cheese, apples, chips, and then back to our room to brush teeth and prepare for our day.

What with our leisurely start, it was nearly noon by the time we reached Whackapapa village, where many of the local hikes begin. We started the day with the Taranaki Waterfall loop, which begins in the low moorland vegetation that covers most of the flatland area, moves into dense forest (rainforest, as the tree trunks are coated with moss to well above head height), and then emerges into alpine heath again. There’s a mostly slow but steady climb until you reach the waterfall near the top of the climb. Taranaki is no Niagara or Victoria, but it’s a 20-m falls (about 65 feet), and like Tongariro, it’s perfect at being what it is, like a lovingly crafted cameo of a larger thing. Beautiful and well worth a lengthy pause to savor the view from different angles. The overall hike nominally takes 2 hours; we spread it to nearly 3.

The return half of the loop climbs a bit farther, then contours comfortably (i.e., few stairways and steep pitches) through more of the moorland until it dumped us back where we started. From there, we stopped at the I-site to ask for advice on what our best options were for the couple hours of hiking energy we both still had remaining. Our young Maori host suggested the Silica Rapids trail, and showed us how to get there. It’s a short drive uphill from Whackapapa Village, with a small and inconspicuous turnout opposite the trialhead, whose sign is partially obscured by brush. The clouds were beginning to look a bit ominous, so before leaving the car, we put on our rain gear.

The hike takes you roughly half an hour uphill into a moor/wetland (grasses, mosses, small shrubs in very damp soil) punctuated by long and tall lava flows. These run downslope for perhaps 1 km (about 0.6 miles), and rise 10 to 20 m (30 to 60 feet), with small streams running downslope between them to form occasional ponds lower in the wetlands. The outbound leg of the hike nominally takes about half an hour. Of course, it took us longer, as we stopped to appreciatethe vegetation (including hardy, end-of-season flowers), and the ponds amidst the vegetation, which ranged from crystal clear to a murky organic orangey-brown. Very few signs of life, apart from a couple birds and one honeybee out sunning on the track. On the one hand, that's a bit disappointing; on the other, there were no mosquitos or blackflies, which would have plagued us in a similar North American wetland.

After climbing and descending the third lava ridge, we came to the rapids, which were lovely. At least three streams flowed into the same channel over a roughly 90° arc, but one was relatively pristine, one had a striking greenish tinge, and the central one was clear, but ran over interestingly yellow rocks, whose color resulted from precipitation of dissolved silica and other minerals produced by deep underground heating further uphill. It’s always lovely to sit by running water, and we spent a while admiring the scenery and peace of the site, which is far enough from the village and everything else that all you could hear was the wind and water. We were joined by an Australian couple who looked a bit younger than us and who, rather amazingly, had completed the Tongariro crossing earlier in the day, and were still raring to go for another few hours.

The threatened rain never manifested, and indeed, by the time we were returning, the sun had come out and painted the land with a lovely mixture of sun dapple (light and shadow). A lovely way to end our day. The hike we completed nominally takes about an hour, but we stretched it to more like an hour and a half. By the time we reached the car, we agreed that this was enough hiking for the day.

Rather than returning to our room, we drove straight past it to National Park Village. Dinner again at Schnapps, with Shoshanna opting for the venison pie (a bed of roasted veggies topped with a puff pastry filled with savory venison stew, which in turn was topped with a puff-pastry kiwi bird) and me choosing the Thai curry chicken. Both shared, and both delish, washed down with Speight’s Old Dark for Shoshanna and Panhead’s “Quickchange American Pale Ale for me. The Panhead was a nice light ale with a bit of a flowery aftertaste and just a hint of bitterness.

On the way home, flotillas of puffy white clouds draped across the mountains, creating beautiful and slowly changing plays of light and shadow on the slopes. Completely magical, and Tongariro is well worth revisiting in the future if time and means allow. We ended the day and our stay in Tongariro with a magnificent sunset outside our back window.

This blog entry ends with a sudden assult of weariness as two days of significant exertion caught up with us. Tomorrow, we go to spend 2 days in Taupo, our second-to-last stop before returning home.

Next installment: April 5