Righty, in a VERY busy net place in a hostel in Frans Josef. Still a week behind on the blogging… here’s just one day’s worth cos there’s too many people waiting to do more than that.

Hopefully in the next few day’s we’ll get a proper chance to bring things up to date. But let’s just say this week has been awesome. We’re in the middle west of the South Island at the mo, having done such things as Horse Trekking and lots of hiking… oh and lots of drinking.

Anyway, just got time to do one entry, so here’s what happened a week ago:

Saturday 25th November
Today we woke up to the odd knowledge that we were only one month away til Pat’s first ever Christmas in the middle of summer.

For the first time, there’ll none of the dread of the 4 weeks of commercialised mess that is the UK in the build up to the once-meaningful event (ooh check my bitterness). I mean, we’ll be exposed to terrible Christm-sorry, Xmas advertising, but it’ll be Kiwi and Aussie advertising and thus a little more amusing.

Anyway, after falling out of bed, doing the three S’es and finally getting onto the coach, Pat enjoyed the views of Lake Taupo as Flea took our coach around the whole east coast… before we made our way into the roads enterting the Tongario National Park.

It’s one of the 100 great listed special protected uber heritage (N.B. I may have forgotten the real name) locations in the world and you can see why – it’s beautiful. Home, no less, to mount Ngaruahoe – a.k.a. Mount Doom – which Pat decided was a great excuse to start listening to the Lord of the Rings: Two Towers soundtrack on his iRiver… really added to the experience, Pat said. I thought it was a tiny bit sad :-)

Mount Doom looked AWESOME – cloud covering the top of it, but still looking massively impressive poking into the clouds. Still can’t imagine it? Don’t worry, allow me to illustrate using my elite M$Paint Skillz:

Who needs a working camera, eh?

That’s correct. Pat does.

Anyway, we all stopped close to it for a 2 hour hike across to the Taranski Falls, which were very pretty – Pat decided to get a photo of both of us standing at the bottom of it, which was, uh, refreeshing due to the freezing cloud of water at the base of the falls… sadly that photo’s on Chris’ camera and I’ve not got it off yet (oh and this net cafe doesn’t allow USB devices anyway, hooray!).

Just imagine what it’d look like – I’m not doing another rubbish drawing :-)

After the nice walk we got back in the bus and trundled all the way to River Valley hostel, which was surrounded by a whole lot of AMAZING scenery – in the low sun, the rolling hills and breathtaking valleys almost looked unreal.

The hostel itself was lovely, and included such things as a hot spa pool (complete with seedy underwater red light), which Kate, Jersey, Jenny and Pat enjoyed monging out in (for about an hour longer than we were supposed to… but hey, when you’re enjoying yourself, staring up at the beautiful starry skies, whilst being hot why would you want to get out to stand soaking in the fuh-kin freezing night air? You wouldn’t, as it’s rubbish. Trust me, Pat did NOT look warm on returning to his room.

Well, I say “room”… it was more “large dorm”. Called an “orgy dorm”, it consisted of two huge bunks, each with 16 matresses per level. Very funny, reall, just a little hard to get to sleep with all the bloody giggling going on.

I think Pat’s getting old and boring :-)

Right, that’ll do for now… bigger session on its way!!!

Sweet as,

Squage