Waitomo Caves

The Tongariro Crossing took the wind out of us. A shrill, cold, gusty punch in the guts. So when we woke up the next morning to brilliantly sunny skies in National Park village, we knew we had to leave quickly, before a profound sense of regret for not waiting a day to do the Crossing in such perfect weather swallowed us whole. Still, bolt though we did, we couldn’t really avoid glancing up at the deliciously blue sky now and then, and sighing forlornly. Hindsight is such a slippery bastard.

We covered the 144 kilometres to Waitomo in less than two hours, with the inland route offering the standard fare of tiny towns and lots of sheep. Bolstered by a scrumptious breakfast at a highway café, we tore into Waitomo, eager for the next adventure. Not entirely educated about what it had to offer besides the numerous limestone caves, we were only mildly surprised when we discovered that Waitomo was the veritable one-lane town, even more so than National Park village. Still, differences exist – while National Park has a more rugged, country-Western sort of feel to it, Waitomo is more… upmarket. Definitely more yuppie. National Park belongs to the grubby, down-n-dirty trampers, Waitomo is for the adventure-elite. It offers manicured “adventure activities”, complete with a “coffee-break and warm showers” at the end of the “adventure”.

I don’t do it justice, though. It really is a good place to head to for a day, for some truly wonderful spelunking and underground sights. Waitomo’s claim to fame is its Glowworm Cave, which, amazingly enough, is host to thousands of glow-worms, dogged long-term residents despite the innumerable unwelcome human guests they have to tolerate each year. The cave in itself is unremarkable (by cave standards, that is. Not that I’d know any better, but hey, I’ve seen pictures! Spectacular photographs of caves in… er… other places!), with the regular assortment of stalactites and stalagmites. The magic begins later, however, when you hop onto a boat and paddle along an underground river, face upturned. A few seconds for your eyes to adjust to the darkness is all it takes, and suddenly, a night-sky descends upon you, in all its fluorescent-green glory. You’d be forgiven for drawing fictional constellations of your own in your head – the resemblance to a star-studded sky is uncanny. There are other glow-worm caves elsewhere in New Zealand, but the one in Waitomo is the most densely populated.

Cave sights apart, there were other… eccentricities to contend with. Most significantly, there was definitely something oddly creepy about our tour guide, a Kiwi named ‘Savitri’. While her pronunciation of her own name was baffling, to say the least, there was also the disconcerting way in which she stared at each of us like we were alien marauders from a neighbouring galaxy. Most unsettling, however, was the tone she adopted with the kids doing the tour. Anyone knows I’m not a devoted fan of children, but I’m miles away from this woman’s mastery of the art of veiled loathing. While most of her conversations with the yell-ey mites on the tour were civilised and gentle, she’d slip in the odd evil-sounding reproach with expert guile. Something like, “Now kids, you really do need to behave, or you wouldn’t want to disappear somewhere within the black, underground river, would you? Hmmm?” Followed by a saccharine smile. I kid you not.

The Tongariro Crossing

A crossroads of a kind. One that would tint, ever so subtly, the little that remained of our trip. In a way, I guess, it couldn’t, shouldn’t really have been any other way, though at the time, I would’ve disagreed violently. Regardless of the fact that there is no dearth of reasons to go back to New Zealand, the one burning just that shade brighter is that I have to do the Tongariro Crossing. Again.

Even before I’d set foot into Kiwiland, the other thing I had my heart and legs firmly set on, aside from the bungy, was this Crossing. The grave title felt misleading, given that the Lonely Planet (and several other sources) repeatedly stated that this is the best, most spectacular, most mindblowing one-day trek in New Zealand. Promises of emerald-hued lakes, dazzling, scorched volcanic landscapes, plains of ash, steaming vents, and miles of blues and greens and yellows and reds. A crossing between three towering volcanoes, Mount Tongariro, Mount Ruapehu, and Mount Ngauruhoe, the latter, better known as Peter Jackson’s “Mount Doom”. A heady prospect, in the end, too good to be true.

So it was that John and I set out, into the bitter cold of 7 a.m. in National Park village, into a wilderness we could barely perceive, thanks to a stubborn fog that we were told would clear up in a couple of hours. Ever-trusting, we soldiered on, through wisps and streams of cloud, trails of wood and rock, up, down, along, over.

Somewhere along the beginning of the route, unchallenged by the gentle terrain, still optimistic, still cheerful, still bursting with anticipation and energy, I would remark to John that even if the weather didn’t clear up too cleanly, I didn’t expect we’d regret making the decision to do the crossing on a less-than-perfect day. But, as it always comes to pass with brash statements like that, Mr. Murphy prevailed, yet again. I spent the next four days nursing a deep sense of guilt for subjecting John to what ensued that day, digging into my wallet to pay for his meals as atonement, deaf to his protests.

The weather never cleared. The cloud never lifted, and the rain never stopped. The heartless wind never relented. And we never got to see a fraction of all that we’d hoped we would. Every promised landscape, every emerald lake, every red crater, painted white. Obscured by clouds, by stinging rain, and the aching cold.

We spent the next seven hours trudging through volcanic ash and sludge, damp and soft enough for our feet to sink into, but dry enough to scour our ankles and eat away at our toes. Shoes filled with pebbles, ash, mud and hellknowswhatelse, and bloodied socks. Furiously flapping ponchos, soaked parkas, dripping t-shirts, drenched pants, drooping caps. Numb hands, frozen noses, icy cheeks, chilled to the bone and the marrow and the whateverelse that lies within the marrow. Seven hours in wet clothes, further refrigerated by the ubiquitous wind. I have never, ever, ever, EVER been that cold in my entire life.

Towards the end of the crossing, when we’d entirely given up all hope of comfortable survival, we stumbled into the Ketetahi hut, the DOC place for long-haul trampers to crash. Furnished with only the mere essentials – basic bunks and two small stoves, it also hosted an additional feature that brought us (and all the other day hikers with us, the collective foolish!) nearly to tears – a heater. You had to see the sheer numbers of miserable, soggy, icicled trampers that thronged and jostled and wedged themselves against each other like pieces in a jigsaw, just so they could get closer to that object of benevolent radiation. And you had to see the funnels, channels of steam issuing from each of us the instant we stepped away from the wind and into the hut. When he regained sensation in his fingers, John managed to take this picture:

John insists that what he was trying to capture was the haze of steam billowing from my cowering back. I can only recognise bits of my bright blue tee and half a mop of wet hair. But there is a certain haze…

Whangamomona

The ‘Forgotten World Highway’ from Stratford to National Park village takes you to a completely different country within New Zealand. Literally. The Republic of Whangamomona is a microscopic blip even on the highly magnified north island road map, but it’s a proud nation by itself, complete with its own president, a restaurant-cum-hotel, post office, and border control.

I was so tickled, I left my bag, camera, and wallet inside the restaurant and walked out chirpily.

New Plymouth

A stroke of sheer stupidity saw me trundling across New Zealand from end to end merely so I could get to Wellington. A flight from Christchurch to Auckland, way up north of the north island, at a painfully ungodly hour, followed by a second flight from Auckland to Wellington, at the southern tip of the north island. It was also during this national circumnavigation that fate decided that I could ill-afford to miss out on the quintessential travel experience that is losing one’s checked-in baggage. Arriving at Wellington airport at exactly the same time as John, a patient wait at the baggage claim carousel slowly turned my expression of mild grogginess into thorough bemusement. Miles and miles of multi-hued bags, of every conceivable size and shape found their way into the outstretched arms of their fidgety owners, yet my child-sized backpack (the size of a chubby five-year old child, I mean) refused to make an entrance. Eventually, through with the cocktail of bemusement, denial, annoyance, and resignation, I tottered off toward the Lost Baggage desk and filed a report. Explaining to the airline staff that my ‘address’ over the next week would change four times caused no little amount of strife, but in the end, the fact that my bag made it to the YHA in New Plymouth barely ten minutes after we checked in is testament to the fact that this probably happens more often than I’d imagined. I guess I’ve just been lucky a lot.

Getting to New Plymouth took a better part of the day. Okay, nearly all of it. Finding the Hertz desk at Wellington airport was easy, though, and soon enough, John and I trotted towards the car park, minus one backpack, eager and gleeful, and into a brilliantly blue Toyota Yaris. Besides the obvious advantage of being able to go wherever, whenever, the hugely underestimated plus about renting a car is that it’s like a large, mobile suitcase. You’d have to see the sheer volume of stuff we tossed over at regular intervals onto the backseat to believe it.

Our bright eyes started dim after a while, though, when the rumbling in our collective tummies grew alarmingly audible. We’d left Wellington behind in an inexplicable (even to us) hurry, so I flapped around with a huge map of the north island while John craned his neck for “knife-fork-plate” signs on the highway. Eventually, we gave in and pulled into a dour shopping complex, in the middle of nowhere in particular, displaying the ubiquitous, gaudy McDonald’s sign. Contemplating a highly suspect savoury quiche, I made a handful of rash promises to myself to never again head to a fast-food joint for breakfast. Well, except perhaps for coffee. Caffeine does make the world wonderfully rosy.

Our first week in New Zealand taught us that the concept of traffic on highways was, mercifully, an entirely alien concept in this part of the world. Imagine our dismay, then, as we turned a corner and were forced to screech to a near halt behind a long, long line of cars humming patiently at average strolling speed. It took us a while, over thirty minutes of automotive crawling, to realise that being a holiday, the entire population of the north island and some were headed toward the splendid beaches that dot the west coast. While that did keep us on the road for longer, we amused ourselves by grabbing eyefuls and camerafuls of pretty, deceptively manicured landscapes, and some patently amusing signs by the side of the road.

My first glimpse of the glowering Mt. Taranaki, towards which we were headed the following day, sent happy shivers down my spine. Taranaki isn’t an “active” volcano in terms of a human lifespan, but merely the knowledge that a couple of centuries ago, more than once, it exploded and sputtered and effused and destroyed everything in its path is a hopelessly, madly exciting thought in itself.

When we finally made it to New Plymouth, it took us even more map-consulting and chugging along bewildering twists and turns in the road before we managed to locate the YHA. Located a kilometre away from the town centre in an unbelievably picturesque glade, this hostel bore little resemblance to its title. Neither was it teeming with youths, nor was it anything you’d come to expect of a hostel, even in New Zealand. In a good way, that is. More akin to a bed-and-breakfast, this place was surrounded by lush lawns in every direction, dotted with individual cottages for the reclusive. A babbling brook by its fringes, and gently cooing birds snuggled within dense trees, all cloaked within a blanket of dewy fresh air. Our six-hour drive to get there felt utterly justified.

Pretty much the strangest (and in a way, the most ingenious) thing we saw that week was upon entering a busy Chinese noodle bar. Drawn to its clean, cheerful sign, we entered, only to be confronted by a wall with a dazzling array of food pictures. I imagine the idea was to keep customers from asking ignorant questions about what the fat-cow-chow-bow-eat-this-gloop-now-you-dim-sum really was, but unfortunately, nearly everyone spent a good amount of time grinning idiotically at the wall before trotting over to the counter and chirruping, “Can you make the Tim-Lim-Bim-Bam-Boo-Zill vegetarian?” Alright, maybe not everyone, but I kinda did. I think they clunked an egg over the top of my otherwise very edible (and yes, vegetarian) noodles as revenge.

Another queer, and entirely unrelated, feature of this town is the crazy slopes of the roads. Cowering inside a car at one end of what can only be described as a road that was most likely a significant segment of a terrifying roller-coaster, we gaped, choked loudly, and then John checked the brakes. My heart goes out to cyclists heading up those roads.

The following day we woke up nice and early and stepped out to take in as much of the town as we could before leaving for National Park village. The waterfront of New Plymouth is one of the nicest and cleanest I’ve seen in any city. There’s a small railway track just in front of the promenade, and I can picture weary travellers smiling richly in their trains, as they watch the pristine waters whiz past. The walkway also hosts another extremely strange contraption – a wind wand. Unlikely to be of any practical use, it serves more as a wonderfully quirky accessory to an otherwise immaculately orderly town.

Before heading out in Mt. Taranaki’s general direction, John and I decided to amble into Puke Ariki, which I’d heard and read so much about. The Lonely Planet’s description is oddly vague, so we didn’t know exactly what we were visiting until we stepped inside. Puke Ariki literally means ‘hill of white hairs’ or something weird like that, so it was with thorough puzzlement that we wandered about inside this excellent museum-cum-DOC-cum-tourist-information-office-cum-all-round-educational-experience. Honestly, there’s no other way to describe it. Taranaki here, Taranaki there, Taranaki everywhere, but it was all so well-done and mindbogglingly fascinating, you couldn’t possibly tire of it. This place even had a room that screened informative and slightly wild Taranaki movies every fifteen minutes. We sat there, in pitch darkness, watching the screen, and seated on the craziest chairs, which glowed, changed into psychedelic colours, and shuddered every time the soundtrack hollered a bit. That chairs shuddered, that is, not us.

It was to get to Dawson Falls via Stratford, forty kilometres southeast of New Plymouth, on the eastern flanks of Mt. Taranaki, that John and I eventually tore ourselves away from Puke Ariki. The weather had been promisingly, if not perfectly, clear all morning, so we hoped to catch the entire volcano in all her towering glory. Worrisome, though, was the stubborn cloud seemingly stuck to the tip of the mountain like super-glue. It felt like it’s take some serious huffing and puffing by the big bad wolf to blow that one away.

The road to Dawson Falls was wonderfully quaint and bewildering at the same time. Etched into the flanks of the mountain in a series of intricate twists and turns, it was lined with the most gorgeous canopy of thick, lush vegetation. It was literally like negotiating those towering mazes at theme parks. Long sections of the road were covered with green all around, sideways, above. Goodbye blue sky.

Dawson Falls in itself is utterly beautiful. Not among those that blatantly tries to dwarf you with their majesty or size, but instead are so pretty and so out of the way (we had to descend a series of steep steps that disappeared straight down from the road and into a tangle of bush, branches, rich, brown sludge, and heavy air), that you can’t help but be utterly taken by them.

When we finally got as close to Taranaki as we could get, it took us a good thirty minutes before Sticky Cloud condescended to move the slightest bit and flash us a glimpse of the mystic mountain top. Thirty minutes of staring fixedly at a single point, and then, whizzzz. It was a flash alright, but utterly, staggeringly worth every minute of standing guard in the cold. Maybe it’s my mountain fixation all over again, but for me, few things can stand compare with the slight of the earth reaching for the sky.