IronKiwi is back in town

It’s good to be back - back to Kiwi Country. Two years have passed since I left New Zealand to finish my studies back home. 

After an 11h flight to Narita, Japan, I was very pleased to meet Yusuke at the Airport where we directly started for a one day trip to Tokyo.  I first met Yusuke at Challenge Wanaka 2013 where we both competed and stayed at the same B&B. Very happy to have a local guide, my main intention was to try the original, the native kind of sushi. And that’s what I got.  Salmon, Tuna? Hah, I got whale, Fugu eggs and all different kind of seafood I didn’t even know that it exists. Yammi and thanky you for this experience, adigato Yusuke!

But all comes to an end, so I boarded Air New Zealand flight to Auckland. 10 long hours of economy, with a blue screen on my entertainment system really made my day.  With the feeling of fully “wasteness” I arrived AKL early in the morning. Straight on to Takanini where I picked up my Camper van again, as I did in 2012. This time, I got a Nissan with a mileage of 266K and LPG. So a basically drive green :-)

After assembling my bike and packing everything into the van, I took a good sleep before a short trip to Auckland city and it’s Skytower with Varun, who I know from studying at Unitec. After refreshing some memories I hit the road and continued to Lake Taupo where I planned to stay two nights. 

Taupo welcomed me with sunshine, but strong winds. So with my first run and bike training on the Ironman NZ course turned out to be quite exhausting. Nevertheless, I felt quite happy not to have applied for that race, as the overall course “beauty” stand in no comparison to the South Island., where Challenge Wanaka 2015 takes place in 2 more weeks. As it seems that again I am the only Austrian competing, I should deliver at least some IMprovement.

However, after only 2,5h of cycling I directly went for a swim to have at least some kind of training ;-)

Next stop on my trip to the south was Whakapapa, which is in the Tongariro National Park, part of the volcanic plateau that’s hosts 3 more or less active volcanoes.  My plan was to hike the summit of Mt. Tangariro in the night to watch the sunrise and to avoid the crowd who was most likely to arise on the long Whaitangi weekend. 

So I started at 2:30am under clear skies and moonlight on the track to the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. As the first “shuttle” wouldn’t leave before 0530am, I had to walk for 2hours to reached the actual start of the track. It was cold, freezing and windy, so it took 4 layers to keep me warm. Shortly before 0600am I stood at the top of the mountain, no one around, the wind was gone and the sun appeared on the horizon. Incredibly beautiful! I felt like the king of the mountain. It was so quiet.

Well aware of the fact, that on this day more or less some thousand (!) people were expected on this track, I started my descent. I hardly made progress on the lower parts, passed queues 100m long before the only toilet hut and questioned the whole mountaineering community… Too many, bad equipped and bad prepared tourists… Puu, I was happy and excausted to be back in Whakapapa after 9h of “speed hiking”. This not being enough, I extended this littler trip by another 2h to make some pictures of Taranaki falls, what I think, made sense..

Everything hurt after this day. I promised to never put on my hiking shoes again… Bullshit. Next day I only wanted to drink a coffee on the Ruhapeu skifield (which is one of the 3 vulanoes), but it ended up in a 2h walk up to the summit, where I relaxed a little bit while thinking about the meaning of life :-)

Lesson learned: SPF75 is a good choice for NZ sun.. :-)