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| That's Rangitoto in the distance |
It was an hour hike up to the summit... prolonged a long whiles by our picture taking. It's the newest volcanic island in Auckland's volcanic field. It erupted about 600-700 years ago and is covered with hardened black lava stones (scoria) that look like either charcoal or cow poo depending on your frame of reference. The rock is light and super hard as Lorena and I realized when we tried to lie down on it.
The island is also covered with NZ's largest Pohutakawa forest. Pohutakawa is NZ's Christmas flower, cuz it's a summer plant and therefore blooms around Christmas. Clever, eh? It's a hearty tree that grows out of anything - including what looks like nothing but black charcoal. The colors of the thousands of red flowers in beautiful green trees were really vibrant against the dark black rocks. Not a huge spectrum of color, but beautiful nonetheless.
On our way up to the summit, we took a detour to go look at the lava tubes/caves. Apparently, when everything was erupting, lava flowed down the mountain and what was on top, that came into contact with the air, hardened and then the lava continued to flow beneath it. The caves are still there and super cool to see.
Before we hit the summit, we got to the crater and looked down into a forest. I've never climbed up a volcano before, but I was totally picturing something a little more like Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings (yes, I'm easily influenced by the media... so what?). However, this crater was covered in trees and one pretty impressive fern.
At the summit we took more pictures (shocker), had lunch and played around with the color accent feature on Lorena's camera.
On our walk back down the volcano, we met with some conflicting signs regarding time to get back to the ferry (our map said 1.5 hours, the sign said 2.5 and our ferry left in 2.5 hours, potential yikes!) so we made some serious tracks downhill. But then we saw a lighthouse and took a picture...
In the end, we were so speedy in our trek back to the ferry point, that we had about 45 minutes to kill until it came. Some of us were tired... |
| laura and lorena on naptastic voyages |
We went out for Christmas Eve dinner at a Thai restaurant and then headed to the backpackers where Lorena and I got distracted chatting with our newest dorm roommates (David from earlier and a girl and a guy from two different parts of Germany). In the end we had a passport party and were all comparing our coolest stamps and visas. David won with an awesome visa from Ghana. I won with the prettiest passport - congrats to the US for finally making something pretty (sorry, but our colored money is such a lame attempt at color compared to, well, the rest of the world, but I digress).
Since it was Christmas Eve, Laura and Todd and I decided that we should actually hit a Christmas Eve service, and there was a church at the end of the road so we got ready for the 11:30 service. I invited our roommates and the two boys decided to come with. So Laura, Todd, me and the boy backpackers all went to the Christmas Eve service at the Anglican church up the road. It was a looooong service and they sing "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" to a completely different tune than Laura and I know, so we mouthed the words :) So we enjoyed a summer night Christmas Eve service with 2 strangers from our backpackers in the southern hemisphere - a wee bit memorable I'd say :)
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