Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 82
Actively
supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds
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| Te Maari crater Tongariro |
Isn’t it odd how seeming misfortune can
sometimes turn things round for the better!
Traveling down from Lake Taupo last week
we were turned back at the main crossing point through what’s known as the
Desert Road because of ice and snow. This rerouted us an extra 50 km around the
other side of the mountain complex of Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu. This is
the first National Park of NZ and gifted to the country by Tuwharetoa Iwi (Central
North Island Maori tribe). It’s a world heritage site and you can see why from
these photographs.
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| Ngauruhoe |
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| Tongariro - steam from Te Maari on left |
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| Shrouded Ruapehu |
It's just as transfixing travelling the
long way and an area we know pretty well, through having worked up here on
conservation issues. We worked with some of the old mountain guides, who were
old enough to remember taking the Prince of Wales up here in a party in the
1920’s. They told of a condition you could fall into if you stayed up on the
mountain too long. You’d get ‘Mountain Happy’ and find yourself measuring up
visitors to see if they had the right moral qualities to be on the Mountain and if they came up wanting you’d order
them off. At which point you knew it was time to get back to town for a while.
Maori perhaps, would understand this more than Pakeha.
To our great pleasure we found Tongariro
alive and smoking (actually steaming). This film is of the Te Maari crater which
erupted unexpectedly in November 2012. It caught everyone by surprise because it’s usually Ruapehu and Ngarauhoe
that are on the go. It is still
broiling away, though you can’t get near it of course (for safety reasons) and we captured the video from a good 15
km’s away.
And then we were also treated to the rare
sight of Taranaki sulking in the distance.
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| Taranaki |
For anyone wishing to travel this route
Ohakune is the ski resort that will get you up onto the Turoa ski field. A must
stop here is the world famous ‘Chocolate Éclair Shop’. It’s been churning them
out for fifty years and they could export them to New York City herself, and
they would be rioting outside the bakery with you New Yorkers trying to get your
hands on the very last one (Believe us!)
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| Ohakune Chocolate eclair |
Track we were listening to while posting this
– it had to be Peter Cape and Taumaranui. This town is about 50 kms away from
this area (as the crow flies). It marks the start of the canoe journey down the
Whanganui Awa (river). The river Maori hold a pilgrimage down the river ever year.
The headwaters are up here on the plateau and much of the water got redirected into
lake Taupo in a power scheme that came on track in the early 1970’s. It took 30
years of rigorous campaigning to restore the water levels back up to a level
where the Awa could start to breathe again.
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| Typical Awa headwaters bush country |
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