Quit and Travel

After completing the “World’s most beautiful day hike”, Will and I set off north for Waitomo and it’s famous caves. Waitomo is a small town on the North Island of New Zealand that people visit to explore the caves below. Being that it is New Zealand and they are all about extreme tourist activities, there are many ways that you can explore the caves. The most popular alternative way (not walking) is to take a Black Water rafting trip through the caves.

Will and I had been told my many people that Black Water rafting is one of the best things to do in New Zealand. Also, it was rated the #14 best thing to do in the country by a large national poll. It seemed like a no-brainer to give it a shot and so we did.

There are several tour companies that offer similar tours. We went with the Legendary Black Water Rafting Company and paid $99 NZD for a three hour ride through the caves. Actually our time in the caves was only one hour, the three hours included all of the time spent before and after the caves.

For the trip through the caves we put on full wetsuits and each picked out a nice black innertube. We entered the caves through a small entrance and once inside we had to hang out for ten minutes to adjust our eyes to the extreme darkness. Our time in the caves was a mixture of walking in 1-2 foot deep water and floating on our innertubes. The water was very cold and some of the passes through the cave were tight. Being a tall guy I had to duck a lot as I walked around and while floating sometimes the cave was no wider than my innertube. The cave was beautiful and the water below us created some nice sounds to go with the surrounding scenery.

The Waitomo Caves are famous for their glow worms. It is tough to take a picture of this (so I don’t have one with the blog), but think of looking up at the ceiling in a cave and seeing tons of glowing dots. It is like having a bunch of lightning bugs stuck to the ceiling and with their lights always on. It was very cool to float on our rafts and just stare at all of the glowing dots above us.

Actually about half way through the trip we were told that the glow worms were not worms. They are maggots and the glowing dot that we see is there because they are currently shitting. Awesome! So we paid money to float through a cave and look up at maggots shitting on us! Will and I both said that we would have preferred if they shared this information with us at the end of the tour because it kind of took away from it all down in the cave. Either way they were cool to look at.

Overall we had a great time, but I don’t think the tour completely lived up to our expectations. The main reason would have to be that we were only floating for half of the time and there was no current in the river. We had to paddle our way through the cave, which wasn’t exactly how we pictured it. Also, the tour wasn’t very informative and it was a little too structured and rehearsed.

After the caves we took hot showers and were treated to free bagels and tomato soup in the gift shop. They let you eat for free because in the same gift shop they had a slideshow of photos from your trip in the cave running on two plasmas. You could purchase a copy of the pictures for $20 NZD. Smart people.

Will and I skipped out on the pictures because they weren’t very good. We instead focused on the free food and had two bagels and two cups of soup each! We do have two pictures of us before we went down in the caves (you obviously can’t take a camera down into the caves) and also I found a few pictures on Google Images that represent what we saw in the caves.

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