Waitomo Caves

Whoo! I am writing this in my bed at a hostel in Waitomo. The hostel is a converted farmhouse, and we are surrounded by rolling green hills dotted with sheep. When you approach the main building, there is a pen with a few cows and a very fat, very happy pig. I am SO happy I had the opportunity to come here.

Today was mostly driving. Barbara and I left The Brown Kiwi and rented a car, which we drove pretty much nonstop to Waitomo through amazing countryside. Much of it looks like Europe, with soft green hills undulating* across the landscape. Unlike Europe, however, there are occasionally sharp rises of hills with prehistoric-looking foliage (think of ferns that tower over you and that are larger than most trees). It’s beautiful and we passed some incredible scenery. It rained on us on and off, which is apparently the norm in the winter here, and we saw five rainbows, which added to the scenery nicely.

We left Auckland around 11:30 and arrived in Waitomo at 2, an hour before the last blackwater rafting trip left. We signed up for it, saw this hostel across the street, and found that it had vacancies tonight. I am really surprising myself; you know that I always like to have things planned out ahead of time. Yet I get here, on a whim go on a road trip across the North Island, and go off to places where I am not sure if I will be able to find a place to sleep. Thankfully, this is New Zealand’s off season for travelers, since it’s winter.
ANYWAY, so we barely had time to put all of our stuff in our room before going black water rafting. It was INCREDIBLE. Essentially, you go into these gigantic, ridiculously deep (69m below the ground!) caves, strap a light to your head that only allows you to see an inch in front of you, and ride down the rapids inside in an inner tube. It was thrilling and amazing and everything else you can think of. At one point, we held the tubes around our middles and jumped off a waterfall. The caves were flooded since it has been raining so much, and the rapids were fast and exciting; we didn’t have to do a lot of trekking through the cave. This was good, because when we did, the current kept making me fall down and look like an idiot.

Barbara and I were the only ones on our trip, and we had three really nice guides. We had a chance to stop occasionally in the cave and look at the ceiling, where glow worms were strung like Christmas lights along the ceiling. They looked like stars against the black ceiling. It was surreal and beautiful, and you can see them in this picture (enlarge it), and now I must ruin it for you. Glow worms are fly larva. They spin silk around themselves to anchor to the ceilings of caves, then poop onto a bit of silk and dangle it down. This poop is what is luminescent and glows, and so insects are attracted to it and get stuck in the silk. So the beautiful glow worms are simply maggots who fish for food using shiny shit. Hooray!

Despite this, however, huge clusters of them are quite amazing. Near the end of the cave, one of our guides told us, “Now we like to play a game. It’s called ‘turn off your light and find your own way out of the cave’.” I thought she was kidding, but apparently not! We were told to follow the glow worms, which we did, and we floated slowly out of the cave, emerging into the New Zealand rainforest, and drifted downriver back to our starting point. There was a dock there where we had practiced jumping for the waterfall jump, and so now we jumped off or fun a few times. This is me in all of the pictures :)



Afterwards we had hot showers and tomato soup, which was a perfect end. Okay, now I’m going to go to sleep, and I am sorry this turned out to be SO LONG!!! I will try to be a lot more concise in future installments.


*I already used the word “rolling”.