Waitomo!

So after our night in the creepy hotel in Hamilton, it fiiiinally stopped raining and we finished our journey to Waitomo Caves. The caves are old limestone mining caves and are lit up by green glow worms. There are maybe 40 or so caves in the area?? Pretty cool!

We spent the day black water rafting, which, to our surprise, is nothing like white water rafting! There are no rafts involved and there are not really any rapids. The rapids are a 1 or 2 on a scale of 1-6 (the rapids we did in Cairns were a 4). There was mostly just a lot of walking and crawling underground so I'm not sure why they call it the same thing! Not good for anyone with even a little claustrophobia! In order to get down into the caves you have to abseil (rappel) and climb and jump way deep down. We dressed up in something like a rubber snow suit, donned some rubber boots, helmet and flashlight and headed down under.

Boy were we surprised when we got underground! Our first descent into the cave was via rappelling (abseiling) down a 100ft waterfall. Yikes! We were strapped to a harness and had to jump backwards down the waterfall. Scary!

There were three other smaller waterfalls to rappel down and we froze our butts off! We climbed through rock formations, climbed up walls and waded through pools of freezing cold water. We got to see a bunch of glow worms...so cool! They looked like a tiny neon green light and there were tons of them. We were underground for four hours in the cold water...crazy! We saw a bunch of stalactites and fossils and bones as well which are formed by the water flowing through the limestone and dripping from the roof (creating stalactites) and coming up from the ground (stalagmites). The glow worms are unique to NZ and they emit light in the larvae stage to attract food. The whole life cycle of a glow worm takes 11 months and they glow for 9 of it.

At the end of the day we were exhausted and ached from head to toe! We were very proud of ourselves though for sticking it out through the cold, wet and strenuous activities. Actually I guess we didn't have much of a choice since there was only one way out but still. It was tough. I'm not sure how people do full day tours...we were beat after a half day! At the end of the day we were rewarded with a nice hot shower -- but the showers had no doors! Free shows for everyone!!

We couldn't take pictures underground but there are some general pictures online that are pretty cool. Check out www.waitomo.co.nz!!

After our exhausting day, I took a nice four hour snooze in the back of the car while Kar and Walt drove to Tongariro National Park, our stop for the night. What should have been a two hour drive some how took four hours...oops! Oh well, more sleep for me :)