Crossing Mordor - NZ's Tongariro Crossing

Matt Risley was forced to ponder previous relationships and how the Devil’s Staircase got its name on North Island’s spectacular Tongariro Crossing

You may have left home, travelled halfway across the globe, navigated labyrinthine airport terminals and the incomprehensible ineptitude of foreign taxi drivers, but when it comes to cultural naivety, we backpackers can still make Kelly Brook look like Stephen Hawking (intelligent, not disabled).

Case in point: the North Island’s Tongariro Crossing. Widely regarded as the most accessible (but demanding) one day hike in New Zealand, and regularly finding a place in world’s top hikes polls (think the FHM 100 for geology geeks), it sees you scaling up and over the very side of The Lord of the Rings’ “Mount Doom” along a track measuring 18.5km.

Weather conditions are violently unpredictable and every year people are found lost or, if you’re completely oblivious, the stiff side of dead. I’d just arrived to the information centre and inquired about the possibility of heading up the mountain.

The chief guide was currently looking at me with a look of resigned sympathy that I’d seen all too many times. Usually when my school teachers were informing me I’d be staying in the special class for another term.

“If you go up that mountain today darling, you’ll be blown straight off.” “Ah. Right then. Well, on a scale from, say, ‘Monica Lewinsky’ to ‘Hurricane Katrina’, just how blowy is it up there right now?”

She politely informed me that (a) there would be winds of up to 70kph and (b) I was an idiot.

It seems that I’d been harbouring the rather foolish, particularly foreign assumption that I could just traipse up the mountain anytime I liked.

So with a day or two to kill I camped down in the nearest hostel, whose living room balcony just happened to have a roaring fireplace and panoramic views of all three snow covered mountains.My legs would thank me for it later.

An hour into the trek and I was already complacent. Stripping off a couple of layers, I dumped them into my bag and forged on over the craggy grey volcanic stone that blanketed the base of the mountain. Bugger volvic, this was volcanicity at its finest.

January 31st, 2011

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