The Backpack at Tongiraro by Zander

            This week, we went on a backpack on Mt Tongiraro.  It was of 3 nights and 4 days. I wasn’t very excited about it. But I wanted to see Mt Doom. My mom was really excited about it, because there were going to be lots of rocks and she really likes them. The only reason that I wanted to go was because we get to eat Ramen noodles and I really like it.  Testing my limits and meeting different people at the same time gave me a better outlook on the world.

            Our hike had some really great scenery. On the second day, there was supposed to have the best. But since it was so foggy, we didn’t see any of it.  On the third day, we hiked back up and we realized that we had been hiking right on the edge of a crater, with an awesome view of Mt Doom. So we hiked around there for a bit, then we hiked down into some sort of desert thing, to get to the cabin. It was really dry, but we could see both volcanoes. It was pretty spectacular.

            On this backpack, I met a lot of different people. There were a lot of Canadians, and Germans, that were backpacking with us. There was this one Canadian family that stayed with us the whole time. Then there was this German girl that my mom scared that lived in Iceland. There were these two Israeli guys that stayed in our hut for one night that taught me a card game called Tacky. I also learned some card games from the Canadian family.  All through the day, we passed by day hikers.   Some were experienced and some weren’t. On the rainy days, they crowded in our huts and they didn’t even pay for it. It was really annoying. They didn’t come prepared and they infringed upon our space.

            For the first two days the weather was really bad. All my clothes got wet.  The thing that was really good about the huts was that they had drying racks right over the heater. It really helped speed up the drying process. After the first day, I had figured out that if I wanted to keep my clothes dry, then I needed to pack them in plastic bags with the food. I was really happy that my sleeping bag was so small or it would have been soaked. On the second day, we had to go over the pass, it has the worst weather.  When we got to the cabin, my mom made me get in a sleeping bag because I was starting to get hypothermia.

            On this backpack I met a lot of different people, and saw some pretty amazing things, and found out how cold I could get before freezing to death, but it was a pretty good experience. I had a lot of fun on the last day of the backpack. I saw a dad and his son (day hikers) that were about 100 yards from the trail entrance. Sweating buckets and looking at a GPS. It was really funny. It made me think that there are a lot of people that have never hiked before.