Waitomo comes from two Maori words wai for water and tomo
for hole, aptly named. These caves were
actually featured in BBC Planet Earth’s Cave episode, I have to check that out
again. I booked a tour online and had
passed the “Black Water Rafting” office just 5 minutes before arriving at the
restaurant where I camped the previous night.
The tour started at 9am but we were told to be there 20 minutes
before. I actually went at 8am as I
figured I’d eat breakfast in their parking lot before getting ready. Lucky that I did. Turns out that this wasn’t the company that I
had booked with. I checked my email and
I was with a company called Kiwi Caves but they were a bit cheeky as their
website was “BlackWaterRaftingWaitomo.com”.
The friendly woman at the reception said I wasn’t the first to be
tricked by this. The place I needed to
go was 15 minutes away do I’m glad I was early!
I noticed that my tour was over $100 cheaper than the
official Black Water Rafting company and I could see why at first. Instead of a nice lodge with new shuttle
vans, Kiwi Caves’ office was an office trailer, the van was 30 years old and
banged up but I tried to keep an open mind.
In the end it was all good.
Daniel was the guide and 5 others were on my tour, a 24 year old German
woman Rebecca and a family from Wellington, Ken and his wife Nicola, their son
Dion and his girlfriend Laliana. We
donned our wetsuits, put on wellies over our wetsuit booties and finished it
off with these clown looking pants with each leg a different colour. Turns out these pants’ purpose was to
minimize the damage on wetsuits. We also
put on an abseiling harness and a helmet with a headlight and then hopped in
the old jalopy.
Within 5 minutes we were hopping out in a farmer’s
field. There were six ropes tied to a
fence and Daniel instructed us on how to hook up our harnesses to practice our
abseiling technique. We walked down to a
depression in the field with a clump of trees.
These caves are littered throughout this area and Kiwi Caves were
leasing this specific one from a local farmer.
To begin the tour we each took our turn abseiling about 30-40 meters
down into the cave. I’d never abseiled
before but it seem pretty easy and quite fun, I actually couldn’t go fast
enough! Once we were all down, standing
in about a foot of water, we grabbed an awaiting inner tube and started walking
upstream into a cave, leaving the sunlight behind.
Our group:
Practicing our abseiling technique:
Down I go...
We stopped about 100 meters in and already you could see
these faint little blue white lights on the ceiling of the cave, about 15 feet
above us...the glow worms! Daniel told
us to sit down on some rocks on the side and turn our headlights off. Cool.
Then “BANG”! And bang again. I thought Daniel was setting off a bear
banger or something of that sort but in fact he was simply slapping his inner
tube on the water. Within a minute the
number and intensity of the glowing lights increased. Wow!
It was like looking at a super starry night in the countryside.
A "tunnel" spider according to Daniel...not a funnel spider which is a deadly one found in, not surprisingly Australia.
Daniel explained that the glow worms, properly known as
Arachnocampa Luminosa, are excited by vibrations and his tube had done the
trick. These glow worms are actually
larvae that dangle down a sticky silk threads 1-4 inches below them. The glowing is actually bioluminescence in
their butts that attracts insects that may fly into the cave and then get
caught and voila, lunch is served. If
they don’t trap any insects, they may just eat another glow worm. Eventually these larvae go into a cocoon and
once they hatch they only live for about 4 days. They don’t eat once they’ve hatched. The males have but one function, have
sex. The females have two functions,
have sex then lay the eggs. Nature is
quite interesting.
Leaving our tubes behind, we continued further into the
caves. At one point deep inside where
there were no worms we turned off our lights and it was black as black. Super cool.
Imagine being in there and your batteries went dead on your light. It would be super hard to find your way
out. I thought about being blind too,
that this is what your world could be like.
We also talked about those young teenage kids who were stuck for over a
week in that cave in Thailand. They
would have had to preserve their batteries and sit in the dark like that for
the majority of the time. Whoa.
We returned to our tubes and hopped on for a ride back to
the entrance and then continued past it.
The water was flowing fairly quickly and was pretty fun. Further down the cave we did a little extreme
spelunking, squeezing our way through some pretty tight spaces. It’s amazing how much the human body can
contort.
Dave in a Cave!
Me and a couple of the girls joked about how small this hole was, only to actually go through it half an hour later on our way back! You had to turn sideways to get out.
Finishing off the tour, we pulled our selves back upstream
with help of a fixed rope and then walked the rest of the way. Finally, one by one we took turns to climb
back out of the cave while attached to a rope with Daniel belaying us from the
top. It felt a bit strange to be back
out in a farmers field still wearing our wetsuits and feeling like we had just
come from another world…and we had!
Some stock photos not from our tour:
Good times!
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