Taranaki The next day I woke up without much hope, but the first thing I saw looking out the window was... A blue sky! Perfectly clear! I leapt out of bed into the car park and up in the distance where yesterday there had been nothing but grey clouds, a mountain had appeared! It was definitely my fastest time from waking up to driving of the whole trip so far! I made it back up to the car park before 9am and got up to the viewpoint and it was AMAZING. Not a cloud in the sky, views up to Taranaki and the adjacent Fantham's peak on one side, and on the other the national park and then the surrounding farmland. If you squint at the pictures, you can even see the curve where the land stops and the sea starts. PLUS out on the left I could see Ruapehu and Ngauruhoe. They didn't come out great in the photos, but in real life they were SO clear, I could make out the snow on the volcano. I'd been planning to do a couple of short waterfall walks around the park, but I went into the info centre again to talk to the DOC lady and she recommended a hike up the slightly smaller Fantham's peak. There were a couple of viewpoints on the hike, it got out above the tree line quickly for the best views and it was a simple up-down walk so I'd be free to go as high as I was comfortable with. It was a fantastic hike, I'd really recommend it. It was mostly steps up through the forest and the first part of the mountain. Normally I'm not a big fan of steps, but these ones must have been exactly the right height or something because I felt pretty comfortable the whole way up. I didn't make it quite to the peak, above a certain point the wind picked up pretty strong and then slightly higher up the steps gave way to a gravel-scree track marked out by poles. It took me about twenty minutes to go half a kilometre or so. It turns out there is a limit to how many times the wind and gravel can knock you off your feet before you turn back, and that limit is 3 ;) according to my GPS I made it to 1500m which is a reasonable way up the mountain, just about level with the first few hints of snow. I took my time heading back down, because the clouds were starting to come in and I didn't want to get caught up in the rain again. In the end I got lucky again though, the mountain itself seemed to be blocking most of the clouds as they came in so although a lot of the view disappeared, my section of the park remained sunny and rain-free. I made it back to the info centre, had a quick lunch, then walked up to Wilkies Pools, a small set of waterfalls in what looks to be a largely dried up riverbed running down the side of the mountain. There were a lot more people around, it being Sunday afternoon and all, but I headed up the falls and soon found a peaceful spot up in the rocks where I could see up to the mountain. After heading down, my legs were staring to ache a bit but I had one more track to do: Dawson's falls, which the whole area was named after. It's one big waterfall, the river also runs a power station that used to power the whole site (now it's also on the national grid, but there is a hotel up there so probably they need the extra power). Not the biggest waterfall, but it's pretty cool how you can see all the different layers of rocks from the volcano in the cliff face. After all that walking, it was getting pretty late and my legs were quite sore, so I headed back to Kapunga for another night. Virtually all the cars did the same thing, I recognised several people both from the night before and from passing them on tracks up the mountain :)
