“When life brings you mountains, you don’t waste your time asking why; you spend your time climbing over them.”
― A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar

The second stop of our New Zealand adventure was in New Plymouth. Grahams old work colleague Ross moved out here a few years ago, and offered to show us why New Zealand is known as the adventure capital of the world. We set up camp for the next few days in a caravan in his garden and agreed to get up at 05:30 the next morning to make the most of the day.

Ross had planned for us to climb Mount Taranaki, which I enthusiastically agreed to. My enthusiasm was dampened a little the next morning when I found out that the summit was just over 2500 m and Ross had ‘attempted’ the climb a few times, succeeding on three of these occasions, with climb times ranging from 7.5 hours to 12 hours. Gulp.

We started the day with a huge bowl of museli and then drove up to the start point of the walk. Thankfully the drive took us up the first 1000m, leaving us with 1500 m to go…. The sun was just up when we set off. We started with an uphill path through the Goblin Forest, full of moss-covered trees. It looked like a movie set from Lord of the Rings.

The path went up and up and up, and the forest changed around us. We came to a fork in the track, with one route marked as closed. Ross confidently strode past the sign and carried on up. The shrubs had grown over the closed off path, leaving us battling through the foliage. After about half an hour of this, the path widened out and we left the forest behind.

What followed was several hours of scrambling up hill, over areas of scree and rocks. Not for a moment did the path take a downhill route, or even flatten out. This was three and a half hours of pure climbing. At several points arms had to be used as well as legs to pull our bodies over the boulders. We took a couple of short breaks to wolf down a cereal bar, but in general we just kept climbing. The views were spectacular (when the clouds cleared) and the plus side to the path going steeply up is that you gain a lot of height in a short amount of time.

As we neared the top we took a little path around the mountain and exited into a snow filled crater. The sun chose this moment to shine, and it was beautiful. After crossing the snow field another short climb followed, taking us to the top. Mount Taranki is apparently the second most conical volcano in the world, after Mount Fuji. It was actually used as the filming location for The Last Samuri. I’m fairly certain that the cast didn’t have to climb to the top every day though.

After exploring the summit, we headed back towards the snow field to stop and have lunch. We definitely appreciated our sandwiches and whole nut chocolate bar!

We then started to descend, this time opting for the conventional path. The conventional path is one huge scree slope. We slipped, skidded and slid our way down, frequently falling over onto sharp bits of rocks. I have a ginormous bruise on my bum to show for my efforts. Don’t worry though – I won’t subject you to a photo of it!!

We slid continuously downhill for almost an hour before the scree slope turned into a path. After this is was a long walk downhill, alternating between path and a steep four wheel drive track.

After seven hours and five minutes of walking, we made it back to the car. It was an incredible walk, nothing like any hike I have done before. We were quite tired out, so stopped to refuel at the visitor centre cafe with hot drinks, chocolate fish and a reccommendation from a Kiwi friend of peanut slab.

After this it was time to head home for a well earned siesta, followed by a barbecue and a very nice bottle of red wine.

Tomorrow we kayak.