Arriving in Taupo

So as we arrived at the outskirts of Taupo we took a short detour to visit the skydive centre where myself and Hanno had spent 5 days when we were travelling 8 years ago. The place hadn't changed all that much, although it does seem to have expanded a fair bit. Taupo is now regarded as one of the skydiving capitals of the world, and it wasn't hard to see why. The airport has three skydiving operations (there were 2 when I was last here), and the main one has a plane going to 15,000 feet (the highest legal jump altitude in the world), and taking 8 tandem jumpers per flight. All that is pretty impressive, but when I was looking at the credentials of their jumpmasters (the guys you get strapped to when you do a tandem), they were all amazingly experienced - a couple were national champions and the most experienced guy had an incredible 15,000 jumps! Anyone in Ireland with over 1,000 jumps is regarded as a SkyGod. So feeling just a tad out of my league there, we drove on to the town proper and got settled at the nice Burke's backpackers.

We stayed 3 nights in total, just relaxing the first night watching 'Blades of Glory' (which I was surprisingly impressed by). The second day we did the mighty Tongariro Crossing, which will take an entire entry all of it's own...