Day 4 in New Zealand: Glowworms, Kiwi, and a Maori Cultural Experience

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:

Here's the entrance to the cave--you can see the footpath on the very right of the photo:

Before we entered the cave, the tour guide gave us a lecture about the endemic flora and fauna. Partway through, he mentioned eels, and I know I didn't say anything, but I think my face probably did something, because he stopped his lecture and said to me, "Do you like eels?"

Y'all. You KNOW how I feel about eels, so obviously I was all, "I LOVE EELS," and then HE was all, "Do you want to see an eel up close?"

?!?!!!!!!!!!

You can only really see one in the above photo, but there were so many eels in this creek! OMG it was so magical.

So then the tour guide went down to the bank of the creek, knelt down, and sort of patted his hand on the water. And I kid you not, a literal eel swam up and stuck its head out of the water, and let the guy scritch it exactly as if it was a kittycat:

That's not a rock the guy is patting. That is a literal eel!!!

It was so great.

You know what's also great? Anytime I get to wear a headlamp!

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!

More delicious flat whites. More delicious crumbly savory pies. I finally figured out that there's a difference between "cabinet food" and the proper menu, or at least most of the places we went to had a menu board up high, and then a glass display case below the counter with a whole other selection. You can either get something made to order from the menu, or pick something already made from the cabinet and they'll heat it up for you.

Only took me four days to figure that out!

Now to the kiwis!

I chose this spot out of all the other many and varied places to see kiwis because it promised a whole little zoo of New Zealand's endemic wildlife, and you KNOW how my kid feels about zoos! And it was a great place to visit, not crazy crowded and with lots of birds and lizards to look at. The kid was delighted.

Here's the taxidermied version of what we're supposed to be spotting:

Here's a random sign that got me curious to know what kiwi aversion dog training looks like:

You can't have any light in the kiwi room, and it is so freaking pitch black that I literally walked into a wall twice. You're basically looking into the kiwi enclosure, where the kiwis think it's delightfully nighttime, and they're sort of bopping around and finding snacks and taking little naps, etc. It took a LOOOOOOONG time for my eyes to get accustomed enough to the darkness that I could even start to make out any kind of movement, and honestly even longer before I could actually see a kiwi, but after a very, very, VERY long time standing there silently and straining our eyes, we actually could see the kiwi pretty well! Occasionally they'd even wander right up to the glass so we could see them up close. They are adorable, all fat and ball-shaped with beaks sticking out, and I LOVE THEM.

The kiwi were soooo cute, but I definitely wasn't sad to also have plenty of animals that I could properly see in the daylight!

Antipodes Island Parakeet

Elegant Gecko

And a little proof that it doesn't matter how early I wake up, anyway, because my body has no concept of what time it is:

One o'clock pm, my foot--it is surely 2am and I could lay down on the sidewalk and fall asleep happily, if not for all the sights left to see!

Okay, this is crazy: as we were walking around the zoo, we kept running into people from our morning tour group, and we'd smile and wave or stop to chit-chat for a second. But one time, the person I was chatting with was all, "Do you want to see the video I took of the kiwis?"

I said, "GASP!!!!"

She said, "I know, I know, but my phone has a very good Night Mode." And, indeed, she DID proceed to pull out the fanciest phone that I've ever seen in my life, and she showed me (and then later emailed me, at my request, ahem...) this:

Fun fact: when I tried to translate her email's signature line in my head, I decided it read, "My iPhone blesses you." Alas that I missed some figurative language, for when I took it to Google it actually read, "Sent from my iPhone." Semantic translation is always such a pickle!

OMG I just realized that I should have also asked her for the videos she surely took in the glowworm cave. Dangit!

I'd dithered a lot about which Maori cultural experience to book for our trip, because I knew I wanted us to do one, but they all sounded the same-ish but had vastly different price points, yikes. I eventually settled on the Mitai Maori Village, and... I dunno, I'm still glad we got the chance to learn about the Maori cultural traditions, but none of us exactly had a blast, and I won't feel the need to do another one next time I visit. 

The parts where we learned about the actual Maori culture were VERY interesting. We got to see the hangi that cooked our meal--

--and we got to see a lot of traditional Maori ceremonial activities, both on the water--

--and in a model traditional village:

This part was super interesting, and it also seemed like the performers were having a lot of fun with it, which is also nice:

But omg everything was soooo crowded, and I felt like we were herded everywhere in just a massive tourist scrum, and then sat down at a table elbow to elbow with strangers, and then herded again through the buffet, etc. I couldn't really tell what we were meant to be looking at or where we were going on our "walks"--

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!

Here's the rest of our trip!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Driving to Rotorua

Day 4: Glowworms and Kiwis

Day 5: Driving to Wellington

Day 6: Weta Workshop and Te Papa Museum

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!

Labor Day Weekend in Chattanooga: We Went to Ruby Falls

 

There were SO many caves that I'd wanted to see in Kentucky and Tennessee, but the timing didn't work out for most of them. In particular, my much-longed-for Crystal Cave tour doesn't actually exist, alas, although I have hiked to the Floyd Collins Homestead, at least. Dunbar Cave, where I REALLY wanted to see Mississippian indigenous peoples' cave art, moved their tours to just weekends the very week we visited, argh. 

But Ruby Falls, inside Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, was perfect for a late-evening tour after a long day playing pinball. I mean, why NOT go see a cave at night? It's going to be dark in there anyway!

The tour guide's explanation of how Ruby Falls was discovered was a little hard to follow (later, Matt and I were all, "The guy was excavating for a railroad, right?"), but this little podcast episode is short and precise:

And now I really want to see the original Lookout Mountain Cave! It's bonkers that it's completely inaccessible.

This cave tour wasn't the most educational I've ever been on, but it WAS super accessible, and our tour group had a wide range of ages represented. The tour guide was more fun and bantering than I, personally, prefer (I prefer a tour guide who recites a lot of facts and then lets me ask them a lot of questions and answers me with a lot more facts), but everyone else seemed to enjoy it, so I'm pretty sure the same type of self-reflection is required as when you find yourself continually surrounded by assholes.

(It's you. You're the asshole.)

We had a pretty large group walking down these long and narrow cave passages, and so to my horror, the tour guide introduced a call-and-response for the last people in the group, who THANK GAWD were not me and Matt, but a young couple just behind us. Every now and then, he would call out, "Tick, tick!" and the couple had to then respond, "BOOM!!!" To their credit, they all seemed really into it. It just made me not want to exist in this particular universe, is all.

HOWEVER, the cave passages WERE all rather long and winding, and various parts of the group would often pause to take photos or admire something, which would get parts of the group backed up, and then someone else would also want a photo so then those parts would get backed up further, etc. It was all well and good when it was a single passage, but at one point I came upon two identical cave passages in front of me, one straight ahead, one curved to the left. 

Which way had the rest of the group gone? Hmm, no way to tell. 

Should I choose one at random? Probably not, but think what an adventure!

Just then, heard very faintly from far ahead, came a distant "Tick, tick!" We still couldn't tell which passage it had come from, so the couple withheld their boom until the tour guide came back and fetched us.

The next time there was dilly-dallying, another visitor in our group was stationed at a confusing junction to wave us the correct way...

I really liked the informational signage that accompanied some of the cave formations, so we'd know what we were looking at--

--or just to tell us the names of the most famous formations:

The mood lighting was maybe a little cheezy, but I liked it, too:

It was a fun change of pace from the typical yellow lighting inside a tour cave.

Our tour was essentially an out-and-back trek to the titular waterfall:

Again, there was a little bit of a cheeze factor with a prerecorded light and sound show, but I thought we had plenty of time to gaze in admiration at the waterfall and discuss amongst ourselves its formation and the watershed that flows into it.

By the time our cave tour ended, everything else on-site was closed, but we could still walk up the stairs to see the original castle-like tower that Leo Lambert had built from the rocks he excavated while improving the cave entrance:

It must be an incredible view on a clear day, but it was beautiful even on this overcast night.

There is still SO much that I wanted to do in Chattanooga that we didn't have time for! I want to revisit the national park sites, ride the incline railway, stay in the Chattanooga Choo-Choo hotel, kayak to that island in the Tennessee River, and visit the bakery that I'd promised to bring Syd treats home from but it turned out to be closed on Labor Day, oops.

Next time!