You Can't Find Gold in a Silver Mine: Bailing on Waitonga Falls

It's time to get back to Tongariro National Park. ...No, not literally. It's 7,000+ miles away, and we already enjoyed a packed day-trip to Tongariro National Park on our trip to New Zealand last month. It's time to get back to writing about that trip!

One thing I find memorable about that day is that we called an audible around 10:30am. I've written before about calling an audible when traveling and how it's important in travel. This one's also memorable because it recalls for me a few lines from the chorus the 1972 Elton John song, Honky Cat:

🎵 It's like trying to find gold in a silver mine
It's like trying to drink whiskey, oh, from a bottle of wine 🎵

I know, "Hiking in New Zealand" and "Elton John songs from 1972" seem to have little to do with one another. So let me explain.

What does an Elton John song from 1972
have to do with hiking in the mountains of New Zealand?

I'd been really wanting to hike Waitonga Falls. Of the 4 hikes we scoped out in the park, it was the one I wanted to do most. But the weather had been crummy since early morning and wasn't getting any better after temporizing for an hour or two with a short hike to Mangawhero Falls and a scenic drive. In fact it started raining harder. And the heavy clouds stretched on for tens of miles (we could see them from above when we were on the flank of the summit at Turoa) so it wasn't likely to get much better for hours, if ever that day.

Hiking Waitonga Falls— and not just merely hiking it, but hiking it in weather that didn't suck— was the gold I wanted to find, the whiskey I wanted to drink. Unfortunately bad weather meant neither was available.

After several moments of fretting I accepted that I wasn't going to get what I wanted. Moreover, I accepted that when I can't get my first choice of hiking in beautiful weather, "Hike anyway but in shitty weather" is not necessarily the second choice! I decided that somewhere else the weather was probably better. In fact that view from above at Turoa made it look like the other side of the mountain wasn't so cloudy. So I decided to bail out on hiking Waitonga and drive on to the next place on our itinerary. Maybe I'd find the proverbial gold mine there.

Hiking Taranaki Falls

When we visited New Zealand last month we made a pretty busy day-trip to Tongariro National Park on the North Island. In just one day we hiked 3 waterfall trails and did two scenic drives— on which we saw at least 3 other falls... and we still had time for a dip in a natural hot spring at our hotel before dinner.

That day was so packed that I've had to catch up on the hiking with after-the-fact journals. Even that catch-up lagged with this month's trip to Los Cabos and Phoenix. Now I'm back to working the backlog. I described earlier today how we called an audible mid-morning in Tongariro with help from Elton John. After bailing out from hiking Waitonga Falls we drove down the mountain its south side, skirted around the base to the west side, then drove up its western flank to Whakapapa Village. Yes, that's it's real name.



From Whakapapa Village we spared little time getting on the hiking trail to Taranaki Falls. It was a long, relatively level trail skirting around the flanks of 9,177 ft (2,797 m) tall Mount Ruapehu. You can see a bit of Ruapehu in the photo above. ...And by being able to see (part of) it you can see that already the weather was better than what we left behind at the trailhead for Waitonga Falls. Indeed, you can't find gold in a silver mine... so why not leave the silver mine behind.

But was this trail leading to a gold mine? For much of the hike we were not sure. Social media trail descriptions and even photos left us uncertain what to expect. The descriptions were unhelpful factoids, like "The falls is over 10m high". Okay, does that mean 10.5 meters or 30? Is the water a trickle or a torrent? And photos on other trails we'd hiked already were just wrong. Like, we recognized the place in the photo... from another trail we hiked. So on this trail we weren't sure what to expect. I was prepped for a trail that was more rewarding as a form of a cardio exercise than the waterfall views. Then we rounded the top of a cliff and this came into view:



Yup, that is definitely "over 10m high". Though if I were given a budget of just 4 words to describe it, those aren't the four I'd pick. 🤣

Even better, the trail didn't afford just views of the falls from the top, it switch-backed down the side of the cliff to viewpoints at the bottom.



I made photos like this one from the trail near the bottom of Taranaki Falls. There was also an obvious use trail leading down to the edge of the pool. I took another many photos down there, too. Stay tuned for more!

Update: More photos from Taranaki in part 2.