Wellington!

This past weekend I flew back to the North Island for four days to venture into New Zealand's capitol and to Middle Earth. I would like to start this post with a little disclaimer - I am decidedly only going to blog about the fun, successful parts of this trip, if you would like to hear more about just how many things can go wrong in four days you'll have to ask me about it. Suffice it to say, life lessons have been learned.

The weekend started off with some exploring of the downtown area of Wellington. The four of us, Rachel, Laura, Courtland, and myself discovered Wellington to be a rather artsy city - full of busy streets with funky shops and lots of public art. The city is a lot bigger than Dunedin, which was nice for a change of pace, although it made driving more difficult... (one of those things you will just have to imagine for yourselves).

Her is a picture of us exploring some of the public art near the Te Papa museum.

The highlight of the day was the Lord of the Rings movie tour we went on in the afternoon. We got to go to movie sites in the woods near Wellington. We also reenacted some scenes for photos and went to the town where the studio filming takes place and sets are built. Here are some silly pictures of us acting like hobbits.

After the tour we went out for Japanese food and then went up to Victoria University where we stayed with a friend of Rachel's. We went back down into town to explore the nightlife of Wellington and ended up at a gelato shop (of course!) for a late night snack - YUM. 

The next day we drove up to Tongariro National park, praying that good weather would allow us to do the Alpine Crossing hike. The trail had been closed the past two days due to high winds, but fortunately they opened the trail for us on Sunday. The weather wasn't perfect, winds were still high and it was so cloudy we could barely see the mountain we were climbing up, but eventually we broke through the clouds on Mt. Ngauruhoe and saw some spectacular views of Mt Tongariro peaking through the clouds below us. 

This is a picture of the volcanic cone of Mt Ngauruho (2291m) also known as Mt Doom!

And here is the view of Mt Tongariro and the alpine lakes just briefly peaking above the clouds.

We probably descended in 1/6th the time it took us to climb up because we basically just slid down the side of the volcano.

Back into the clouds all you could see was mist.

After a long day hiking and other ordeals we found a really cute little backpacker in Wanganui where we made hot chocolate and had a really good nights sleep before flying back to Dunedin on Monday. On the plane ride home I enjoyed a nice, complimentary glass of chardonnay - Air New Zealand does it right!