The excitement of a road trip is always enhanced when an evocative route name is involved, so you can picture our joy when we discovered that our journey away from Taupo would take us along the Volcanic Loop Highway and on to the Desert Road, you can’t get much more evocative than that. For forty minutes or so we hug the shores of the lake before we pull away to pass through the volcano belt which provides great views of the largest of them, Tongariro, with its almost perfect peak. From there it’s through the heather-clad rocky desert before we regain pastures and hills as the coast comes ever closer.…