Our last full day in lovely New Zealand! We were up just as the sun was rising and I put a jumper on over my pjs and ran up the road to get a photo of the sun coming up behnd Mt. Doom!!! Then we packed up and went and had our breakfast which was included in the rate. A real hiker's breakfast: the works. Just as well as we didn't get near food again till after 4.

And of course, it is Bob's 66th birthday today. We are going to celebrate tomorrow night back on the ship but still… a special day today!

A fond farewell to Tongariro and we headed north to Waitamo. The drive was gorgeous. Honestly, every time you turn a corner there's a new wonderful view. We arrived in Waitamo about 11 o-clock and booked to go and visit the caves. This whole area is full of caves and they have become quite an industry. When it started back in Victorian times, it was just a couple of caves which people visited. These main caves are now augmented by quite a few private caves and the tours have got quite diverse. In some of the more traditional dry caves, you walk through visiting the various rooms and viewing the stalactites and stalagmites. In others you float through in a boat looking up at the cave roof and walls which are covered in thousands, maybe tens of thousands of glow worms. In others you can do black water rafting which is like white water rafting except it's in the dark!!!! Or you can have a massive adventure where you abseil in, wade, float and climb through a series of caves. Being elderly LOL we opted to visit a walk through cave to see the formations and also a boat trip through a glow worm cave.

Unfortunately, you are not allowed to take pictures in the glow-worm cave. No doubt this is due to many people being unable to turn the flash off on their camera but it was really annoying…. However, it was a sublime visit. The outer caves are magnificent. Huge and cathedral like with many tites of all sorts. With amazing acoustics. When the guide found out it was Bob's birthday, the whole group sang Happy Birthday to him just to prove it!!! It was very nice and an unusual experience.

The cave was very dark, I think by design to get your eyes used to the dark for the boat trip. Anyway, the boat trip was the highlight. You drift along in a small boat which the guide pulls through the caves by tugging on an overhead rope. The caverns are just alight with all these thousands of glow-worms, rather like the starriest night you can imagine. I didn't know that glow worms (or this sort anyway) are the pupal stage of a particular fly. Not a happy life. The adult fly lays the eggs in the cave. The eggs turn into larvae (glow worms, the bio light is in the tail) and each worm hangs down about 70 gloopy saliva strands to catch its food and feed. Then they hatch into a fly. Unfortunately the adult fly has no mouth so after reproducing, it dies. Sometimes it gets caught in a gloopy string from one of its offspring and is then devoured….. so….. drifting along looking up at the glow-worms in the dark, you had to work a bit to forget that for each light you saw, maybe 70 gloopy strings were hanging above your face. YIKES!!!!

The caves were surrounded by delightful sub-tropical forest. We walked to the second cave which was a traditional dry cave with no glow worms. Amazing stalactites and stalagmites though and massive chambers. We were allowed to take pictures in there. At the entrance he showed us some massive spider like creatures hiding in the cracks. I mean, maybe a foot across. There were lots of them and apparently at night they leave the cave and go outside hunting. I kept looking back down the passage expecting to see giant mummy spider-thing advancing on us!!!! Maybe I've watched too many horror films….

Coming out we saw some people emerging in wetsuits with tubes. That must have been fun…. I would quite like the float tour but not anything with abseiling, climbing or in fact squeezing through narrow crevices. Come to think of it: worms with dangling snot strings, big spider things which hunt in the dark…. Maybe….. not……

We just had time after the caves to head about 20 miles west to see a huge waterfall - Marokopa Falls which drop around 30m in a classic block formation. We had to walk about 15 minutes through a lovely forest to get to them and they were very much worth seeing. What is really nice about many of these sights is that you are likely to be the only ones there, as we were. No crowds at all. Such a pleasure.

After that a bit of a tense drive as we were very low on petrol and the petrol station promised by our gps went out of business 10 years ago. We were in the absolutely boonies I hasten to add. Luckily we made it to the next one on a whisker I should think. Starving we were too and this place was a sort of all purpose country general store so we had a bit of a snack there sitting outside.

And then on to Auckland Airport. Had booked a room at the Novotel which is literally across the road from the International terminal. Parked the hire car in their car park for collection. A nice hotel, very modern and super convenient for our flight at 820 tomorrow morning. Had dinner in the hotel which was expensive but nice food. Absolutely knackered. Its been a fabulous 5 days and we are very determined to return to see more of this beautiful country. It seems ages ago we got off the ship.