Glowing Underground...

Wednesday 9th November
Yesterday we took the bus from Aukland down to Waitomo Caves, on a bus driven by possibly the most annoying man in New Zealand, he gave us a running commentry the whole way, which seeing as we were on the motoway the whole way was slightly unnecessary and included information such as how grass grows, that Tiger Woods plays golf and what a supermarket was.

Waitomo is famous for having over 380 caves and not much else, so we just had a chilled afternoon in the sun. The real fun happened today when we joined a tour with the Black Water Rafting Company for some adventures in one of the caves. Once we were suited and booted in wet suits, helmets and wellies we were driven to the cave entrance, where we absailed about a 100ft down a tiny hole in the ground into the underground wonderland. After our absail into the darkness we started trecking through the tiny passageways, we then ziplined (with our helmet lights switched off) though the darkness lits by hundreds of glow worms!

As you can probably tell I am a big fan of the glow worms. Basically they are larvae that live in the caves in NZ, and use their little blue-green lights to attract food and mates. It was incredible zooming through the darkness under what looked like a starlight night, when in fact it was the light from thousands of glow worms' bums. The next part was a bit wetter, we were all given black rubber innertubes and had to jump backwards off a small cliff into the cave river below. I did not like this bit so much as when I landed in the water I got about half of it up my nose... inhaling freezing-cold cave water is not pleasent. Anyway despite the freezing water, I soon got settled in my tube and we started to drift down the amazing black waters. The long cave was as high as a cathedral and once we had all linked our tubes together we turned out our helmets and floated along in the pitch black, the many surfaces of the cave ceiling literally plastered with glow worms... it's something that is nearly impossible to do justice to in a blog, it was just incredible.

After being suitably enchanted, we ditched the tubes and crawled, walked and swam through more of the caves, going over mini waterfalls, through tiny tunnels and over rocks and pools. Our final challenge was to climb up two waterfalls to get back out of the caves. Now I love rock climbing, but I've never had to do it without ropes, in a wetsuit, underground and with gallons of water gushing over me, still after a bit of effort I managed to get back to the daylight. The caves have probably been my favourite thing in New Zealand yet.

Thursday 10th Novemeber
Brad, one of our caving guides took me for a hike around the area today, while Juilette caught up on her emails. We walked all around the land above the cave and then did some climbing into some other little caves nearby, and we also visited a really pretty waterfall, it was very nice to have this special treatment from someone who knows the area and all the secret caves that other tourists might not know about.

Lovely as Waitomo is, by late afternoon we had to say goodbye and caught our bus to Lake Taupo for some more adventures, not before a long earned sleep though.