Day Two - January 3 - Waitomo

Tuesday we left Hot Water Beach and headed to Waitomo. Waitomo is an extremely small town (pop. of approximately 60 people) with an extremely interesting attraction: the Waitomo glowworm caves!
On the way to Waitomo, we stopped for a 45 min hike around Karangahake Gorge - an area that was once rich in gold and silver deposits. Stopped in Otorohanga for lunch and then headed on to Waitomo.

That afternoon I did one of the coolest things so far on this trip: the Black Abyss tour at Black Water Rafting. Myself and some other Kiwi Ex guys got picked up at the hostel by our guide for day. The Black Abyss tour is a 5 hour caving trip into the Waitomo caves underneath Waitomo. We got suited up in wet suits, boots, helmets and harnesses for the trip and then took the van out to the middle of the countryside to the entrance to the cave.  The Black Abyss started with a 37 meter abseil (rappel for you Canadian folk) into the dark cave.

We had two guides : Lloyd and Matty. Lloyd started us out at the top by getting us hooked up to the rope, and Matty was at the bottom, holding the rope and ready to help incase something went wrong. Let me tell you, 37 meters may not seem like it's that far, but when you are going down vertically, suspended in mid air, in a damp and pitch black cave; it's a damn long ways down!  The rest of the 5 hours were spent entirely underground in the caves, keep that in mind. As soon as we all got down into the cave, we followed a path to the Flying Fox - a zip line over an underground river, and you must do the zip line in the dark - Matty turned off all our helmet torches before we went flying through the air. Definitely freaky!

After a quick stop for hot chocolate and flap jacks on a cliff above the river, we put our butts in some rubber tubes and hopped down 4 meters into the river. From here, we pulled ourselves up stream with a rope, and turned off our lights. The glow worms were all over the cave roof, and when you turned your light off, they looked like a starry night.

Glow worms are essentially maggots, related to spiders. They put out little strings of web to catch their prey and then pull in the strings to feed. They stay as maggot for about 6 months of their life cycle, then go into cocoon and come out as a fly. As an adult, they only live up to 3 days - during this time they mate for 24 hours. The males die as soon as mating is over and the females lay little groups of eggs all over the caves. Very neat little maggots, that's for sure. (ha ha!)
After checking out the glow worms, we floated down the river on our tubes. We ditched the tubes and walked down the river, in some places where is was too deep to walk, our wet suits helped us float down the river. One spot we got to slide face first down a waterfall, pretty crazy.  We stopped for some pictures, hot juice and chocolate to get our energy up. Our guides were pretty good at scaring us when our lights turned out. They were a riot. We kept floating down the river, and eventually had to start walking through some caves with low roofs. Yes guys - even I had to duck in some places!!  It was tough walking through some of the caves because we were fighting upstream against loads of water coming down into the river. We were getting near the end, when our guides told us that the only way to get out of the caves (unless we were weak and took the easy way) was to climb up 2 waterfalls. It was one of the most nerve wracking things I did the entire time in the caves, with tons of gushing water coming down. If you made a wrong step climbing up you would get pushed down by the water. It was tough, but definitely rewarding when we climbed up and out of the cave into the daylight. Such a great tour!

Got back to the hostel, walked down to Curly's Pub just down the street from the hostel for a much needed beer. Taught some of our English friends Matt, Phil, Martin and Jamie how to play quarters, and they pretty much schooled us after a few rounds, ha.