We stayed in another glorious Airbnb overlooking the lake before an early alarm for the most uncertain but exciting part of our North Island adventure: the Tongariro Crossing. The extent to which you must only do this hike in the right conditions cannot be over-emphasized (for guidance, check the Department of Conservation website), so our action-packed itinerary made this particularly risky given we only had one free day to do it (you very much need a full day including a very early start). Mercifully, we got lucky and had perfect conditions, with barely a cloud in the sky and views all the way to Mount Taranaki around 140km away on New Zealand’s west coast.