After breakfast this morning I went and played on the climbing wall. I'd never done anything like that, and being strapped into the harness reminded me a bit too much of parachuting, but the old guy running the place and supervising me was really reassuring. Mikey was hanging onto the other end of the rope and after the initial fear of falling off the wall, it was great fun. I tried the really high walls too, and got a bit scared, but even when Mikey left a bit too much slack in the rope when I jumped off the top of the wall and fell a little further than either of us intended, it was fantastic just hanging 30 feet in the air until Mikey let me down.

It was very tiring, and I found that my arms were getting very shakey so we untied ourselves and did a quick bit of internet banking (Nationwide is playing up again) before heading out to a very nice hotel that we'd booked. I haven't been able to have a nice long bath since America, months ago, so Mikey decided we should find somewhere luxurious to spend a night. The one he chose, called The Grand Chateau, is right on the Whakapapa (unfortunately, the Maori pronounce 'wha' as 'fu'...) ski fields, and was also the place that the Lord of the Rings guys stayed in for several weeks when filming in Mordor. It was an hour's drive from Taurangi, and the heavy rain turned to sleet as we travelled further south. It was actually snowing by the time we reached the Grand Chateau hotel, and the ground was becoming slushy.

We wanted to head up to the ski fields, just a few miles up the road, to see the area used as Mordor in the Lord of the Rings films, so we took it quite slowly through the slush. Only a few hundred yards up the road was a sign saying that only cars with snow chains or four-wheel drive should go up. About a mile further on we saw why, and found out that our car was rear-wheel drive, which is useful to know! It got a bit slippery, so Mikey did a very neat four-point turn and we drove down quite gingerly. We enquired at the local tourist office about buses up, and were told that there wouldn't be any buses until the ski season opened at the end of the week. It seemed that we were a couple of days too late to be able to drive up there ourselves, and three days too early to utilise the ski facilities. The snow was much heavier now, so we checked into the hotel, hoping that we'd at least get some nice views tomorrow.

The hotel was not busy, the ski season starts on Friday, so they upgraded us to a really nice room. The very friendly manager guy on the front desk told us not to worry about the sirens - they were just testing them in case the volcano errupts. Mount Ruapehu's been due to errupt for about five years now, and they'd recently installed warning systems in the area, just in case. Realising I was quite excited about that, he showed me the map of the projected lava flow and pointed out that the hotel was right in the very middle. Cool!

The hotel is wonderful. It has a small pool and a sauna, a very nice restaurant (with a dress code, that we were allowed to sneak past in our non-smart shoes cos the hotel wasn't busy), a cafe, a huge lounge with a snooker table and masses and masses of snow. It was a veritable blizzard now, and even though the hotel guy phoned the bus company and told us that we could get up to the top if we wanted to, we decided to make the most of the hotel and have some lunch.

We made a dinner reservation in the restaurant, and during the meanwhilst I had a very long bath, wandered round the hotel, had a bit of a nap and watched the snow fall until it got dark. Dinner was wonderful: roast lamb, Oyster Bay chardonnay, creme brulee, port by the fire, and I was as happy as I could possibly be, on the other side of the world from my family! I kept checking to make sure it was still snowing. It was.

It was a fantastic evening. We watched the snow fall from an enormous window (a single pane about 12 feet square) in the lounge, and the Christmas tree (left over from the staff mid-year party at the weekend) twinked behind us. It was June.

Finally Mikey decided to teach me to play snooker, and I think he was cheating a bit - he kept making me hit the white ball rather than the nice red ones I was aiming for, but he let me be the 'special man' who returns the balls to the little spots on the table, which sort of made up for it. It was still blizzarding at midnight when we finished (he won, and I actually earned about eight of my 48 points, which was nice). And because we'd let the nice barman convince us that we'd be snowed in tomorrow, Mikey made a reservation for tomorrow night too! I left the curtains open all night so that I could see the snow falling. I slept really well.