WanderLustin' - Travel Log

Our final three days traveling with Mr. Scoobs and Mambo were pretty unexciting, unless you count getting rained out of doing the Tongariro Crossing, a minor gumboot mishap, a semi-major medical emergency (not one of us, don’t worry Moms), and a full-on breakdown of Mr. Scoobs on our way to Wellington.

I won’t bore you with all the gory details, but here are a few highlights:

We left Maketu with everyone incredibly hungover from the night before. We spent some negative karma points when nearly everyone on the bus bailed on a rafting trip we’d booked the day before. The guides were not amused, but we just couldn’t rally for it.
We spent a rainy afternoon in Rotorua catching up on email and griping about how we were both nearing our wits end with the bus/backpacker experience. It has its up sides, but the lack of air-con and the chaos of the twenty-somethings was really starting to get on our nerves.
Through another series of unfortunate events, we walked 10-15 minutes in the pouring rain at 6:30AM to meet the rest of our group to do the Tongariro crossing, only to discover that it had been cancelled just minutes after we’d left the group the night before (and they had no way of contacting us). At least we got a couple more hours of sleep, but the rain actually stopped soon after, and we would have had a pretty awesome day doing the hike. Alas.
On our way to our next lodging, we stopped at a very cool hot springs area and cooked up a group lunch by putting bags of food in steam boxes in the ground and letting Mother Earth do the cooking. Pretty cool, and very tasty. Check out the photos in our Tongariro to Wellington photo gallery.
We stayed at a very nice, new hostel called The Park, in a town called National Park, in the Tongariro National Park. Mambo had fun saying “The Park, in National Park, in the National Park” over and over again. We did an easy hike to a waterfall near the hostel, and tried not to look up at the Tongariro area and think about how nice the crossing hike would have been that day.
The next day was supposed to be an “express” day to Wellington, but it didn’t quite turn out that way. Mambo showed us a few funny sites along the way, including a big snowman statue and a giant carrot (more photos in the Tongariro to Wellington album). I proved I have zero gumboot throwing skills by throwing my boot *backwards* and getting it stuck in a tree. One of our bus mates saved me, though, by graciously stepping on a big piece of glass and cutting his foot pretty badly, thus distracting everyone from my “special” performance. Mambo jumped into action and was ready to drive us all to a nearby hospital to get Chris’s foot stitched up when… Mr. Scoobs refused to start. Four hours later, he had a new (or at least improved) starter motor, and we were on our way. We still made it to Wellington in time for a nice farewell dinner with Mambo and some of our bus mates.

That’s the quick update for now… We had a nice extra day in Wellington and spent a few days near Picton doing the Queen Charlotte Track. More on that soon!