Man, Reece and Roderick started there trip already weeks month ago, and I get to post the images of our last adventure just now. In November Mary and I drove up to New Plymouth to meet up with the guys and to hike Mount Taranaki.
Mount Taranaki is incredible. It is 2518 meter high and one of the most symmetrical volcanic cones in the world. We could see the volcano on the horizont despite still being 2-3 hours away from New Plymouth. It looks surreal how the solitary Mountain thrones in the otherwise very flat surrounding landscape. Sadly we were a too early in the season to climb the summit, as there was still too much snow up there. But we did an absolutely awesome crossing. Starting at the Visitor Centre in North Egmont we basically did the Pouakai Circuit. Instead of looping back to the Visitor Centre, we hiked down from the Pouakai Hut to Mangorei Road, where we parked one of our cars earlier. The hike was amazing and let us up to ~1500 meters on Mount Taranaki, through a swamp on the south side and over the few smaller peaks including secondary volcanic cone called, Fanthams Peak or Paqithai on 1,966 metres. And btw. Mt. Ngauruhoe (aka Mount Doom) is not the only volcanic movie star of New Zealand: because of its resemblance to Mount Fuji, Taranaki provided the backdrop in the The Last Samurai.
