Ahhhh...Waitomo...one of our most anticipated stops yet! I'm sure anyone back home who knew of our trip has heard us talk about glow-worms and “black water rafting.” Well, it turns out that black water rafting is the lame equivalent of a dark lazy river...so much for all the hype. Thank goodness we had our trust Stray bus driver to direct us toward something MUUCCCHH more fun...Spelunking!!! As you can see by the pictures, this is not only an extreme sport, it is also a fashion contest ;). This turned out to be quite a bit more extreme that we had originally bargained for. I believe the spelunking business is designed for much smaller people than Joe and myself. The adventure consisted rappelling down 3 waterfalls (about 300-400 feet down into the cave) and working our way back to the surface by crawling on our knees and/or stomach, swimming underneath flooded tunnels, and climbing rock cliffs. Needless to say...we were exhausted, cold, and (in the case of joe) smelled like 300 sweaty men. I think Joe may have liked that last part!. I have pictures of this, but they are on CD still and i'll post em up as soon as i can find a computer with a CD-rom.
On the way out of Waitomo the bus driver stopped at a “bunny shearing shed.” Yep thats right, they shear gigantic fluffy rabbits there. Quite possibly the most random thing i've seen so far on the trip. Not really much else to say about this one ;)
-=EDIT=-
I realized that i never put anything up about the famous "glow worms." Sheesh, im bad at this game. Anyway, these caves in Waitomo have these wierd little creatures (maggots not worms), that live in the ceilings of the caves. The way they get their food is by extending a little filament from there beeehinds that has a little glowing ball on the end of it!!! exciting eh? well, there are 1000's of these things in the roof of most of the caves and they look like stars at night when all the headlamps go out. THey wouldn't let us take pictures of them, because the flash hurts the worms or some malarchy like that. But google "glow worms waitomo" and you should get lots of pictures.
