You have to do some tramping in New Zealand, and being a bit of a tramp myself it felt really good to leave the bus behind and get back to nature. I was a bit worried about Elaine, but it turned out she was a tramp too. We spent four days walking the Abel Tasman Coastal Track and met some nice people on the way, including a Spanish guy who used to come over as a Spanish student to Ballybrack back in the day. The world is too small!

I found a great walking stick (which I called Whizzbat, Elaine called hers Slim) and it really helped going up over the ridges and headlands. Unfortunately it made me look like Moses, but it came in handy for parting the seas…

There were some great moments– sleeping in the giant hut bunks with 7 other people (keys in the bowl folks) and barely making a tidal crossing on the Awaroa Estuary and getting soaked.

Oh and Elaine fell off a cliff. She's ok though, Sylvester Stallone wants her for Cliffhanger II.

Photos on Flickr

After leaving smelly Rotorua we headed over to Taupo where we stayed for a couple of nights as we were going to do the Tongariro Crossing; a 19.4km, one day hike across an active volcano and then through some amazing scenery– craters, calderas, sulpher lakes, alpine ridges, thermal vents and sub-tropical rainforest. The Mount in some of the photos is Mount Ngauruhoe, which Peter Jackson used as Mount Doom in Lord of the Rings. Elaine was Frodo and I was Sam…

It was a really tough day but at the end of it we felt really good, and got to lounge on the beach at Lake Taupo watching the sunset behind the mountains we'ld just climbed. Sweet as!

Photos on Flickr