A True New Zealand Adventure

Glow worm cave day! Once more, we owe Monique more than I can say. It was from her that we learned about the Waitomo caves. She told us that it was one of the highlights of her trip to NZ and that we should just 'suck it up and cough up the dough' as it was not to be missed. She was SO right.

There are tours where you can just walk through some of the caves and look at the glow worms but, no no, that was not what we came here for. We came for the "adventure tour", where you get to tube through the caves and see the glow worms. You also get to do some hiking, rock scaling, wading, waterfall jumping, groping your way through pitch dark caves.... THAT was the tour we came for.

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For starters, I got to wear my very first wetsuit. I can now say with some confidence that I don't see much of any activity that involves a wetsuit in my foreseeable future. Just getting it on was half the adventure! We walked a bit to the opening of the cave where, upon seeing that you had to slide down a rock and into a narrow opening just to get in, let alone how dark it appeared once you were inside, one of the women in our group started to cry. The adventure cave tour is not for wusses.

Once in, we sat for a bit to let our eyes adjust to the pitch blackness. The next couple of hours were spent winding our way through the tunnels in ice cold water (and suddenly the wetsuit was the BEST idea ever), wading through water while blindly trying to keep your footing on the rocks below, tubing, parts where you had to turn around and jump blindly backwards into pools below, jumping off of waterfalls and, oh yes, floating. Lots of floating. It was beyond amazing and SO much fun.

Also amazing were the parts where everyone turned off their headlamps and the whole cave went absolutely pitch black and you could see that the whole ceiling of the cave was illuminated by tiny glow worms which attach themselves to it. It was like when you lay on your back in a grassy field in the summertime and look up at the starry sky... except that we were doing it in tubes in ice cold water 200 feet below the ground. Awe. Some.

In our group there was a fellow American, Chris. We have encountered very, very few Americans on this trip so were kind of surprised to hear someone speaking in an American accent. She's from New Jersey and doing a couple weeks traveling on her own in NZ. Turns out she was going to the same town we were going to after the cave adventure so, as so often happens while traveling, we decided to head there together.

So this evening we all landed in Rotorua, a town in the center of the north island of NZ known for both its Maori culture and its biothermal hotsprings. First things first: hotsprings. Culture can always wait for later when there are hotsprings to be had.

We found a place a little outside of town where you can go on your own and enjoy natural hotsprings. No fancy resorts around them, no entrance fees, just straight up hotsprings in the middle of the forest. Turns out that these hot springs are sulfuric so you smell them before you find them. In fact, the whole town reeks of sulfur, some times worse than others depending on the wind, but you really can start to tell when you're getting close to the actual springs by just how pungent the smell gets. So we followed our noses and we found them, and we enjoyed. Of course it didn't occur to any of us to take off our jewelry so anything silver we had on going in came out a darkish black looking metal. Whatever, we were sitting in natural hotsprings in the middle of the New Zealand countryside... I have NO complaints whatsoever!

Okay, full disclosure: since we obviously couldn't take pictures while trudging through water in the caves, none of the interior cave photos in this post were actually taken by me. But still, I wanted to give you SOME idea of what we were looking at while in there...