I woke up grumpy and sleep deprived. The Eastern European tourists in the neighboring camp kept me up the whole night. They never ceased opening and slamming the doors of their car. “Creak, SLAM!, creeeeak, SLAM!, creeeak… … … SLAM!” It was like a rhythmless Stomp concert. I am a notoriously light sleeper, so by the morning I was a wreck. Anna didn’t miss a wink.
We hit the facilities and discovered that the coin operated hot showers had a fortunate design flaw; they worked without inserting coins! Hurray! Free hot showers! After a week on the road you really start to appreciate the little things. A small consolation for my sleepless night.
After cleaning up a bit and eating breakfast we hopped in the Teal Thunder and headed up the mountain. Mt. Taranaki is best known for its role as Mt. Fuji in the film Last Samurai. It’s such a perfectly conical mountain shape it’s almost a cliché. Unfortunately the mountain was covered in clouds for most of our visit, so I didn’t get a good landscape shot of it.
We started by hiking the magical Ngatoro trail (or the Goblin Woods). It was without a doubt our favorite hike of the road trip. It was like wandering through one of Brian Froud’s dreams. It’s difficult to describe, and pictures barely suffice. So I’ll post a lot of them.
After spending some time in the Goblin Woods we headed up another trail named the Veronica Loop. They call it a loop, but it’s more like a straight climb up hill, and then a straight descent back down. It felt like significantly more uphill than downhill though. It’s like an Escher painting where the perspectives don’t quite makes sense. There were some beautiful views of the valley and surrounding mountains along the trail though, as well as some more of the mossy forests, so it was well worth the effort.
I even found a really funky purple fungus that brought out the crazed mycologist in me, and I spent ages trying to get a decent picture of it (while Anna got impatient and continued up the hill).
After exhausting ourselves on the mountain we went back into New Plymouth and went for a swim in the Tasman Sea. The water was freezing cold, and even though it was my idea to go for a dip, I would barely go in past my navel.
After swimming we went and bought some delicious seafood salad sandwich makings. Then posed our lunch for some photos! Gaze upon our sandwiches.
With a belly full of assorted seafood we headed down to the beach to poke around in the tide pools. Lucky for us there was even a toilet bowl shaped rock, should our sandwiches take a turn for the worse.
Afterwards we took a sunset stroll down the pier and came back to our tent to collapse after another perfect day.
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