Saturday, 15.02., Mount Ruapehu - Hike to Lake Surprise

Our hosts recommended this hike to us. They think it's great. There aren't many people and it's suitable for experienced hikers. We drive by car to about 1,200m. The surrounding landscape seems surreal to us. The weather, with its dramatic clouds enveloping the volcanic mountains, is perfect for this hike. We will cover a total of 546 meters in elevation and 9.5 km. When we look out into the landscape, we can't see much of the elevation we have to cover because the canyons in between are hardly visible.

We find grasshoppers as yellow as the moss and grass around them.

And what a surprise when we come to a stream with a waterfall where calcium carbonate deposits on the stones. The water is really as cold as it looks!

And there are hearts lying around in the grass that need to be photographed. But they are too heavy to take with us.

We have to climb, walk over wooden bridges, and constantly look around in this landscape, and we come to a shelter that was built in 1958. It is unlocked, very clean, there are mattresses, a stove, and water. Perfect. We continue over the next stream. Reinhard finds a Hemideina Crassidens - an endemic long-horned grasshopper - in the cold stream. It is cold-resistant, can completely freeze in winter and thaw again in summer - just like that. It appears ours was washed down the mountain with the meltwater.

Up and down again and up again and there it is - Lake Surprise. Surprisingly, the water is not peat brown and definitely not cold. But we don't want to swim in it either. So we strengthen ourselves before we start the return journey. Now we also know how often and how steeply we have to climb up and down. We tie our shoes tightly again and off we go. Even on the way back, we balance over the streams and don't get our feet wet.

Finally, the lake shows itself through a window in the distance - quite far away! Pretty exhausted but happy, we have arrived back at the starting point.

That was truly an adventure tour!