Climbing up and sliding down volcanoes in National Park

The Tongariro crossing is hailed as New Zealand's best one day walk, so I just had to do it. I started off walking alone, but I kept meeting people so after 8 hours of solid walking there was a nice group to finish with. After 8 hours you need a bit of company and laughter to make it to the end.

By far the best thing on the walk was climbing Mt Ngauruhoe - you might know it as Mt Doom from Lord of the Rings. Not many people climb it as it is a bugger to climb & isn't part of the main route. I've always wanted to climb a 'proper' volcano though, and it doesn't get much better than Mt Doom. The slopes are steep, around 45 degrees to the ground, and are laden with balck volcanic ash and rocks. The rocks themselves are pretty special, all different colours and full of holes where air got into them during the eruptions. Every step sent more and more of these rocks tumbling down the volcano. Going up was hard work, I thought my heart was going to burst out of my chest. But coming down was brilliant fun, with each step I slid about 1ft down, it was like slipping down on a snowboard but without the board. Like a snowboard, if you stop you fall over, so I had to keep going down really fast until I reached the bottom.

I met 3 guys, Tony, Dunc and Rich, on the crossing, and they all thought it would be a good idea to climb Mt Ruapehu, another volcano, the next day. Ignoring how much my legs hurt, I joined them. It wasn't quite a hard climb as Mt Ngauruhoe, and unlike the first volcano it had a lot of snow on top. There was no marked track, so we just followed our noses until amazingly we found the volcanic crater at the top. Having lunch on top of a volcano is pretty cool, but again, by far the best bit, and this could contend with the no1 highlight of my trip, was coming down.

We got out our plastic bags & waterproofs, sat on them, and sledged down the ski-slopes. I've not laughed so hard for ages as we went hurtling down the slopes, rolling over and doing cartwheels in an attempt to avoid the huge rocks. We had a snowball fight half way down for good measure, it's the first time I've done that in the middle of summer.

That afternoon we met a nice girl who writes articles for a backpacker's magazine. She wanted to interview us and took loads of photos, so next month I'll have my 15 mins of fame when I appear in the magazine!