Day 26 Rotorua to Mount Doom and the Plains of Gorgoroth

Day 26 Rotorua to Mount Doom and the Plains of Gorgoroth

We began this morning with a short walk through Jurassic Park….well the Whakarewarewa  redwood forest where it was filmed….

This is turning into a bit of a film set tour – but more of that later…. We then visited the Rotorua museum in what was the Victorian bath house.  It is an excellent museum of Maori culture and the history of the area – including the devastating eruption of 1886 as well as its settlement around the thermal springs.  We then made our way past Lake Taupo to Tongarira National Park for our big trek tomorrow.  We stopped at number of interesting and beautiful sights along the way – bubbling volcanic mud pools,

the Wai-O-Tapu ‘Thermal Wonderland’ with volcanic pools of a range of colours from blue and purple (manganese oxide) through pink (iron oxide) to fluorescent yellowish – green (so much sulfur that you would have sworn in was dyed…),

Taupo town and lakeside (where I picked up a brilliant piece of pumice….much better than the one I have been using for those lessons) and Huka Falls.  Our young guide Nicole is a whitewater kayaking expert….she is planning to kayak those rapids and falls on her next holiday….rather her than me…..  From there we entered Lord of the Rings land….I’ll let Rob explain….                                                                                    

We didn’t really intend on doing this  - well, I looked at it when we were first looking at holidays in this part of the world - but in the end a tour of middle earth wasn’t Patti’s cup of tea so we settled for New Zealand instead. However, Peter Jackson certainly wasn’t shy when it came to filming his own country and labelling it up as various locations in Tolkien’s made up world so in the end it seems relatively impossible to travel New Zealand without it becoming a tour of Middle Earth. So right now we have found ourselves at the foot of Mount Doom where we are supposed to spend a couple of nights and tomorrow we walk over the plains of Gorgoroth after passing over Emyn Muil and through the woods of Ithilien and later we will scale the sides of Mount Doom – well… weather permitting. After going to Hobbiton, this is certainly turning into an unintentional retracing of the steps of Sam and Frodo – if only we had a magic ring!

Seriously though without even trying we are visiting many of the places used by Jackson to stage his films and in a way it is quite cool – well I think so – but I am a bit of a Lord of the Rings nerd. I am not sure Patti quite appreciates it as much.

The weather is rain – rain, mist and cold – so we can’t actually see the mountain – but it is supposed to clear up tomorrow and our room in the Skotel looks straight across at the mountain – so we should have some fine views in the morning. The hotel is a Scandanavian style ski lodge – all wood and chalet style. Very cool. It is – of course – in the middle of nowhere so we have to eat with the others as there is just no other option – not that I mind eating with the other guys in the group but I am not sure the others feel the same – mostly because it is something they must do and they are the kind of group who hate doing what they must do..