Day 5: Waitomo Cave Tour

We woke up to an overcast drizzly day in NZ.  What a perfect day to spend underground!  We toured with a company called Spellbound.  Our cave tour started with a short drive through NZ country side to their glow worm cave.  Our guide explained that the entire area was dotted with glow worm caves and the farmers who own the land above lease the caves below to the various tour operators.  Our tour first took us on a short walk into the cave where our eyes adjusted to night vision and our guide told us all the details of the life cycle of the little glow worm.  It turns out these little creatures are quite vicious.  They will eat any little insect that crosses their path including their own kind!

As we traversed deeper into the cave, we happened upon a RIVER (which we expected, because it was in the brochure).  We all piled into a raft and and headed down stream.  As we all sat in the raft, gazing at the spectacular show of glow worms above, we moved slowly down stream to the sound of the water rushing over an impending drop off.  I thought this little raft ride was about the get really interesting as we neared the falls, however, it was not to be.  Our guide turned the raft around and headed us back up stream.

If we thought we saw a lot of glow worms when we had done the Arannui Cave walk the night before, we were only seeing a small version of what could be.  The glow worms may venture outside the caves, but the vast majority of these little guys prefer the damp protected interworkings of the caves.  The place was so beautiful.  Of course, glow worms don't really twinkle like stars do, but you get the same sort of feeling you get being under a clear sky at night.

After the glow worm cave, our tour took us to a second cave.  In between caves we had the opportunity to be drenched by the New Zealand rain.  It was a bit cold and definitely wet (as rain always is), but when you're on vacation rain is just plain FUN!  Our tour guide provided warm drinks as biscuits (cookies ... yummy) to get us warmed up before we went into our next cave.

The second cave was a dryer cave with very few glow worms.  This was our chance to get a good look at the limestone formations underground and see exactly how the water chemically erodes away at the rock.  There was also a place in the cave where part of the roof caved in (exciting!) and a few bones of animals gone astray to check out.

All in all the tour was great fun.  We spent the rest of the day driving to Ohakune where we were greeted by our new hosts Alan and Susie.  Their home is just beautiful and very modern, just built a few years ago.  We arrived around 4:30 so we had time for another hike and then a drive up to the top of Ruapahu (which is a ski resort in the winter time) for a good look at our surroundings.  Mind you, the day was still cloudy and over cast giving us a very surreal kind of feel to the landscape.  Our forest walk was just beautiful with a stream running through the area, HUGE ferns and trees and massive amounts of foliage.  Once we arrived at the top of Ruapahu, the landscape change drastically to volcanic rubble and very little plant growth at all.  We also experienced around 40 mph winds when we were up there that really put into perspective the potential for disaster on the Tongariro track that we have planned that we are probably not going to be able to complete because of the weather.