After a day in Auckland, being lazy, preparing the laptop wandering around some of the city and shopping for a few supplies I was ready to set off south.
I drove 230km's today, through Hamilton and on to Waitomo, where they have some pretty good caves worth a visit. I went inside Aranui Caves, which was full to the brim of stalactites and stalagmites formed over many hundreds of years. The longest stalactite measured 5 meters, and having heard the guide say that they grow 1cm per hundred years, it was easy to see how long they had been here! Most of the lowest stalactites had broken ends as the first people to visit here over a hundred years ago used to break them off to take home a souvenir! The caves obviously have light systems installed now, and walkways for safety, but are still pretty interesting places to see (not quite the same as the cave I visited in Koh Lanta!). After this cave I took the forest walk nearby which ran towards Ruakuri Caves nearby, where they do black-water rafting. I didn't arrive in time to take part in this today, and will probably get a chance to do this elsewhere should I need to. The walk was really nice though, through some pretty wild forest an d it included some naturally formed caves and shelves to walk through and under alongside the fast moving river. Later in the afternoon I went along the road to the Glowworm Caves for a guided tour in there. There is no photography allowed in this cave, the guide said for safety reasons, but it must surely be for the benefit of the glow worms themselves also? Flash photography would put them off of the job in hand in the pitch black! They are actually more like insects than worms, but begin life as a pupae and so aquire their name. They live on the roof (or any horizontal surface they can grip), in the pitch black of caves which have water running through them. They hang down a thin thread covered in saliva and then glow brightly to entice the flies brought in by the river to come up and stick to the thread where they can be eaten from... lovely fellas! Their life cycle is extremely short and they only breed to keep the life cycle going! Bizarre existance. The caves themselves were not as spectacular as the Aranui Cave, but the 'cathedral' was bigger (the cathedral is the name given to the biggest cave in the system, or at least the one with the highest ceiling), and the cathedral in this one is so acoustically sound that they hold live music gigs in here from time to time! The highlight of the tour (pun intended!) was the pitch black river boat ride deep inside the cave. The guide pulls the boat along on a series of cables fixed inside the cave, and you are treated to the sight of tens of thousands of glowworms on the ceiling, all glowing for their lives! It is almost indescribable, the only way to imagine it is to think of a picture of the milkyway and then fill in all the black bits with even more stars... quite an awesome sight! You get value for money in there too, and go all around the cave so that you can take it in from every angle...
Later that evening after cooking up a storm in my van, I watched the first of the Lord of the Rings trilogy that I'd bought a week or so ago. Tis a little more inspirational whilst being here I think!
Pictures are on facebook for you to see
