Tuesday, January 22 - Visiting the Volcanic center of North Island

     We plan to get to the South Island fairly quickly because it's filled with lots of places we want to visit, and Kelly and Dan have about a month before they leave.  Diana and I will return to the North Island in March to explore it more completely.  But there is one area we all wanted to see together.

    New Zealand has two islands of relatively equal size but quite different geological histories.  The more mountainous South Island was formed by plate tectonics, with ongoing mountain formation due to the collision of the Pacific and Indo-Australian Plates.  The somewhat flatter (flatness being a relative term, it's hillier than southern Ohio) North Island sits on the Pacific Rim of Fire and has some of the most active volcanic areas in the world. Three large volcanoes dominate the center of the North Island, and we planned to check them out.

Picnic lunch on the road south from Auckland

Mount Ngauruhoe.  One of the stars of "The Lord of the Rings", it played
the role of Mount Doom.

Kelly and Dan taking their daily photo in front of Mount Ruapehu, the largest
of the three volcanoes in Central North Island.  

It will be a several month wait before this chair lift operates

This area of the mountain was used for  many scenes depicting Mordor
in "The Lord of the Rings" movies.  No, that is not Peter Jackson.

     We were the only people up on the mountain.  It was an eerie, dark and dangerous place, we wouldn't have been that surprised to see orcs crawling out of the crevices and caves.

     We stayed the night in a nearby Department of Conservation (DOC) campground, crowded with backpackers and other tourists.  But compared to the private campgrounds nearby, at least the cost was reasonable.    We had tuna salad for dinner and got to bed fairly early, with our alarms set for 4:30 am to get us up in time to catch the shuttle bus for our climb up Mount Ngauruhoe the next day.