A Rainy Taranaki Falls Track

 

 

 

 

 

 

 When you are on vacation and you have a tight schedule, you don't allow rain to get in your way.  Taranaki Falls Track was hiked on a cloudy and rainy day.  The track is a two-hour loop that starts from Whakapapa Village to Taranaki Falls. The falls is on the Wairere Stream. Visibility was very poor but it made some interesting photos with hanging clouds, foggy overlooks and misty streams.

'A Room With A View' Whakapapa Village

This was the back deck from our room at Whakapapa Village.  Mt. Tongariro is the large mountain in the above photo.  Taranaki Falls Trail started at the Village. There were only two places to eat and there were no shops. The view was spectacular in all directions.

Quotes from "Room with a View" by E.M. Forster

“It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”

“When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.”

   

“The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View  

  

E.M. Forster (1879 - 1970), was an novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society.
 He had five novels published in his lifetime, achieving his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924) which takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj.

The Majestic Clouds of Mt. Ngauruhoe aka Mount Doom

 

 

 

 

 

 

This was the view from our hotel room at Whakapapa Village in Tongariro National Park.  Mt. Ngauruhoe was Mt. Doom in Lord of the Rings.  They filmed quite a lot of the Mount Doom scenes in Lord of the Rings, such as Sam carrying Frodo up the cliffs. It is a conical, single-vent volcano with perfectly symmetrical slopes.  Due to rainy weather and approaching storms, the clouds would eventually cover Mt. Ngauruhoe with their hues of pink and golden fingers.

 

Mount Doom From Lord of the Rings