Caving!

The day started in the best possible way - without an alarm being set. Then leaving the bikes behind we walked to the glow worm cave to buy tickets for the day. We'd looked into doing an adventurous abseil, rubber-ring combo but it was pretty cost-prohibitive so instead we decided we'd look at the two original caves which gave Waitomo its name.

First up was the glow worm cave. We had a little time to kill so browsed the tacky souveneirs with the mass of Japanese tourists. On the tour itself we walked down into the cave and saw a 16m deep shaft, stalagtites, stalagmites, columns and a big cavern that a few famous people had sung in (eg Dame Kiri Te Kanawa & Justin Timberlake!) Then we boarded a small boat and our guide manouvered it around the Waitomo River which carved the cave so that we could see the 10,000s of glow worms that hung under the roof. The glow worms are the larvae of the mouthless fungus knat and emit a green glow to attract insects into their web. Although this is quite gross it looks amazing and it really was like a galaxy of stars above us. As the little French girl in the row behind us said: "C'est magique!"

We really enjoyed this trip and it was far better than we had expected. We had time between the two caves for a spot of lunch and then we took the cross-country route to the Aranui Cave. We ran out of time half way along our route after taking in an unexpected hill-top summit so had to short-cut onto the road but we made it in time. The Aranui Cave was also spectacular - no glow worms (as no river flowing through to bring in the bugs to eat), but a colony of wetas and loads and loads of stalagtites, stalagmites, columns and "rock flows". Some of the rock formations were so white that they looked like molten wax. This was also a super trip with an informative guide.

Before we turned home we took in a "bush walk" which turned out to be an excellent walk through collapsed parts of the Ruakuri cave system. We walked through little tunnels and to lookout points which were suspended over the river. After this we picked up the Waitomo Walkway (that we bypassed on the road earlier) through farmland following the Waitomo River back to Waitomo. It was a really pleasant walk and on the way we met a tree enthusiast with a dog called Yo Yo who didn't let us get a word in edgeways. A good job we were fairly interested in trees and birds!

Having checked out the general store there was nothing really to cook with so we went back for more pumpkin patch pizza at the Morepork Cafe.