Isildur!!!

Greetings from Mordor!! It's 10 O'clock in the morning, on May the 29th, if you want to know. Yesterday we climbed Mount Doom!! (Mt Ngauruhoe). We are staying in National park village and set off yesterday morning to walk the Tongariro crossing. With it being a one way walk you have to travel with a track transport company. As a result we had about 8 hours to walk 18km- pretty cruisey. However after about 7km there is a side trip up Mt Doom which takes 3hrs, so we decided to do it. Mt Doom is a bitch to walk up (fair play to Sam for carrying Frodo up), it is basicly a big pile of scree with some rocks on the top, so for every 2 steps you take up you slide back down 1. That said, it was well worth the effort, not only for the views from the summit, but also I can now say that I have climbed Mount Doom!!!-(you can call me sad- I don't care).
Anywhoo, it meant we had to walk fairly quickly for the rest of the walk, but we still made it with half an hour to spare.
Since the last blog we have been to Picton, got the ferry over to Wellington, met up with the Fox* again, broken down in Jen's** car, gone back to Wellington and come up to National park village. The back packers here has a climbing wall- and a good one at that. So we have climbed both days we have been here, as well as pioneering the sport of climbing wall megaswing resulting in only 2 minor injuries!!-result!.
I am writing this whilst sitting at the road side waiting for a hitch to Raglan but sadly there is little traffic. I sense a change of plans is on the cards.
Yep, i was right. We are now in Aukland having decided to ditch the hitching and get a bus. So we now have a few days to see a bit of the Northern North island.

* Mike's new name. For those of you who don't know Mike, His name is Michael Jones. From this I was calling him Michael J Fox and have since shortened it to 'the Fox'.
** Jen is Mike's friend who lives in Wellington. We broke down on the way to do a weekend walk.

Hope everyone is HunkyDory.
xx Matt xx