Glowworm Caves

We managed to fit in a quick 24-hour getaway to Waitomo last weekend. Loosely translated as 'water hole' in Maori, Waitomo is a tiny town that sits atop a network of underground limestone caves. It's a popular tourist attraction in part because these caves are inhabited by millions of little gnats with luminescent poop (aka glowworms). 

Waitomo is about a 2.5 hour drive southwest of Auckland, and we made our way down via Hamilton. Hamilton is unofficially known as the armpit of New Zealand (at least that's what we've been told), although Emma has been informed that they have an excellent hospital. We decided against dropping in to the Emergency Room to confirm this.

Instead, we made a lunchtime pit stop at Good George Brewery. You may recall that they brew the beer that is served at Hobbiton. The brew pub is located in a cute repurposed barn in the industrial area (that's a joke, because Hamilton appeared to be one big industrial area). While not the best that we've tried in NZ, the beer was quite refreshing. The food, however, was delicious. So delicious, in fact, that we returned for lunch again the next day. But more on that later.

The remaining 45 minutes of the drive to Waitomo was peppered with a few bucolic attractions, including this mural of quintessential kiwi items. We can now name almost all of these things. 

We cotinued on to find hills beyond hills beyond hills.

We made a stop to check out the big apple at the Big Apple Cafe & Orchard. Not to be confused with the Big Apple of New York. Unfortunately they were closed. Apparently Waitomo (and surrounding area) is the city that always sleeps.

While we would have liked to try some real fruit ice cream, the Big Azz Ice Cream stand was also closed. Of course it was closed. It was 4pm on a Saturday in New Zealand.

While we didn't get any ice cream, we were able to bond with an inquisitive emu as we entered the sleepy town of Waitomo. 

Shortly after, we pulled into the parking lot at the Waitomo Hotel. 

These photos of the hotel were actually taken in the light of day on Sunday morning, rather than when we drove in. However, try to imagine this place on a cold, rainy night at dusk, and you might appreciate that it looked pretty creepy when we pulled up. We felt like we were arriving to be extras in a remake of Psycho. Doesn't it look a bit like the Bates motel? 

Our historical hotel was full of creaky floors, lightshades straight out of the early 1900s, and an eerily empty restaurant. All of the tables in the restaurant were set, but we never actually saw anyone in there. The restaurant also boasted a massive central fountain with no water in it. We thought we'd try and get breakfast there on Sunday morning, and arrived during their advertised breakfast hours to find not a soul in the restaurant or kitchen. We ended up driving 15km out of Waitomo before we found somewhere that was open for breakfast.

Later, when we arrived at the caves and told our guide where we'd stayed, his first question was whether we'd seen the ghosts. 

Supernatural experiences aside, the Hotel was a pretty neat place to stay and we would have liked to have had more time there (to possibly meet some ghosts). But we had important things to do, like black water rafting through the caves and then returning to Good George brewery.

We booked a two-hour cave tour with Cave World and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Our guide was a bit of a joker (as Emma's granddad would say), and had us convinced that we were going to run into a pod of 10 foot eels during our expedition. Fortunately, it was dark enough down there that we were oblivious to any eels that slithered by us.

We were given wetsuits and inner tubes and led down into one of several networks of caves underneath Waitomo. This particular cave is called Te Anaroa, meaning 'footwhistle' in Maori. It was named footwhistle because one of the stalactites (stalagmites? Justin would know...) looks like a whistle with a foot underneath it. Clearly, early cave explorers were nothing if not creative. The cave is approximately 3km long, and we were able to traverse about 1.5km of it. Water flows through the majority of it, and the water level is high enough throughout the second 1.5km that you'd need to submerge yourself fully under water to get through some parts of it. Not safe for tourists.

Justin looked pretty cool in his caving gear.

Justin took some video footage of the cave walls, but unfortunately glowworms are not at all photogenic and most of them did not turn out. Here's an idea of what it looked like:

We spent a bit of time learning about the glowworm life cycle, and the fact that the glowing material is actually their excrement, rather than part of their body. Then, we were all told to sit in the water on our inner tubes, and our guide hitched us together, and pulled us through the cave while we stared up at the bioluminescent spectacle on the roof.

Of course, it wasn't a completely tranquil experience. There are a couple of waterfalls within the cave, and we had to traverse both of them. The first one was a 2 meter drop, so each of us had to stand with our back to the waterfall and heels hanging over the edge, clutch our inner tube to our bum, and fall backwards into the darkness. Emma had to go first, and was slightly terrified. It didn't help much when the guide told us that if we should happen to get caught underneath the waterfall and unable to get our head back above water, we should just curl into the fetal position and all would be fine.

The second waterfall was 7 meters high. Luckily, our guide didn't expect us to trust fall backwards off that one. Instead, there was a waterslide! We don't have any good video evidence of the slide, but it was pretty fun.

While the caves were truly spectacular, the highlight of the weekend (Emma's at least) was meeting this two week-old baby goat who had been rescued by one of the local farmers. The farmer was trying to teach him to walk on a leash, somewhat unsuccessfully. He was a bit shy at first, but we quickly learned that he likes to have his head scratched. His little stub of a tail wagging back and forth was pretty much the cutest thing we'd ever seen.

We are definitely going to need a house with a goat enclosure when we move back to Canada.