To make up for not doing a ton of sightseeing the day before, we did ALLLLLL the sightseeing today!
Probably one of my least attractive qualities is that when I'm traveling, I prefer getting up and getting going as early as possible. I like to be standing at the museum door when they open it for the day. If I'm doing something that requires a reservation, then the earliest reservation is the reservation for me! Crowds get larger as the day goes on, and I hate crowds, and I also just kind of like to be the first person to see something that day.
So it wasn't even completely light out by the time we were in our rental car winding our way west from Rotorua, and before most other people had probably finished their breakfast that day, there we were with our group, following our guide and hiking our way down to Waitomo Cave.
It's on the grounds of a sheep farm, so you know what that means!
My ultimate New Zealand day tour would be riding around sheep farms, eating snacks and stopping to gaze at endless hills of sheep standing picturesquely:
That's not a rock the guy is patting. That is a literal eel!!! |
Literally think I should buy a headlamp for walking Luna at night. |
We didn't really use our headlamps for more than a few minutes in the cave, because obviously you don't want a headlamp on when you're looking at glowworms, so honestly I think they just had us turn them on for a bit to make it more fun for us. Or maybe it was, like, secret disaster prep so we'd know how to turn it on in case we all got stranded inside.
Actually, all of New Zealand was VERY proactive with disaster prep. Every group thing we did included a lecture on the emergency meet-up spot, what various sirens meant (siren less than 30 seconds is just calling out the volunteer firefighters; siren longer than 30 seconds means flee for your lives), and how to summon help if our guide collapsed. Just hold down the red button on their walkie-talkie!
But this day held no disasters, just glowworms!
Glowworms are so great. They're the larval stage of a fungus gnat, and they dangle these long strands of mucus out of their mouths, and they glow near their butts. Moths and other insects that fly into caves are attracted to the light, then get caught up in the mucus strands and the glowworms eat them.
Alas that they're terribly hard to photograph, especially after you turn all the external light sources off so your eyes can get used to the dark and see even more glowworm lights:
Just imagine, in the above photos, a hundred thousand more lights around the brightest few that my shitty phone camera picks up. Imagine the ceiling is the night sky somewhere unpolluted and dark, and the glowworms are all those stars you've always heard look super amazing in an unpolluted, dark night sky. We took a leisurely boat ride in complete darkness down the little stream running through the cave, and the ceiling was like the greatest night sky full of stars ever. It was honestly one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my life.
After seeing the glowworms, we took a snack break, then hiked over to a different part of the cave system for a dry land tour:
This part of the cave looked very reminiscent of the limestone caves I'm familiar with in Indiana and Kentucky, and it turns out that they really are very similar, with the same type of karst topography and limestone created from a former shallow sea.
But instead of mastodon skeletons hidden inside like the caves at home, these caves have moa skeletons!
This right here is the first I've heard about the moa, but stay tuned, because the next day I found every single moa skeleton in the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and I took its photo.
Here's a diagram they had of their entire cave system, although it's not completely explored and mapped:
As we early bird tourists were chatting towards the end of our tour, we figured out that most of us had basically the same plan for the rest of our day, and we had a fun time continually running into each other at the Fat Kiwi Cafe and the Otorohanga Kiwi House.
We had to skip the few nearby hikes and a local caves museum, but... KIWIS!!!
But first, breakfast!
Antipodes Island Parakeet |
Elegant Gecko |
The parts where we learned about the actual Maori culture were VERY interesting. We got to see the hangi that cooked our meal--
Do you know where I am or what I'm looking at? Because I don't! |
--and greatest crime of all, before we got herded from the river ceremony to the theater, our host told us not to stop to take photos, not even of the super cool sacred natural spring that was easily the most awesome thing there, because we had to get to the show and we'd be coming back by on our walk later and we could take photos then.
Yeah, the host didn't mention that the walk we could take photos during was going to be a nose-to-tail shuffle in the dark, sooo... not really prime photo-taking opportunity, you know?
That being said, the food was good, the show was excellent, and you've got to get your Maori cultural experience somewhere, right?
So again, glad we did it, wouldn't do it again.
Anyway, enough with the bitching--tomorrow we're going to go see more geothermal wonders and hike on top of a mountain!
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!