Woke up at 7 am to get going for our long day at the Tongariro Alpine Crossing! We arrived at the Mangatepopo car park at about 9:15 and prepared for our 19.4 km journey. We hit the trailhead at about 9:45 am.
The journey was amazing and for the first 3 hours we were making out ascent towards Mt. Doom or Ngauruhoe as it is really called.
At the top it was extremely windy out and I literally thought I could be blown off the mountain top. The air was also freezing because of our altitude and there was some serious wind chill going on. After seeing Red Crater where Frodo threw the ring in Lord of the Rings we began our first descent.
We continued on and found a beautiful place by Emerald Lakes, just before Blue Lake that would mark our halfway point.
We enjoyed a quick meal and watched as some clouds came over us and decided we better keep moving as it was cold enough without rain. I believe the Emerald Lakes were my favorite but the Blue Lake was also stunning.
We kept our pace up and made it to the bottom at Ketetahi car park at 4 pm finishing the trek in 6 hours 15 minutes which included our stop for lunch. I was feeling pretty good about this until I heard the world record for the 19.4 km/12.2 mile trek with 3700 feet in altitude change was 85 minutes! I definitely think I enjoyed the trek much more at my pace! We did not follow the guide books instruction to book a shuttle back to the other car park and instead just asked people as the came down if they were heading that way. A very nice couple was waiting on 2 more friends to come down and agreed to take Sebastian to the other car park and then Sebastian would come back to pick me up. It worked out quite well, I even got a beer from a tour company that had just finished their trek. Score! Afterwards we took off to find a place to park the campervan overnight on our way to Whanganui.
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