After overnighting in Picton we got the early ferry back to the north island and headed straight to Waitomo and pitched the tent in a campsite / backpackers for the last time.

Emma put on a brave face, considering her cave phobia, as we booked ourselves on the full on fiver hour black abyss tour. We turned up and the rest of our group were a load of teenage lads off the Kiwi Experience bus, full of bravado. We climbed into yet another wetsuit and harness (it's so old hat to us now) as the young lads fannied about fretting over whether it was all done up right. A quick practice with the ropes on site and it was time to descend into the earth!

Emma bravely steped up to the abyss first and started on the 30m abseil, sqeezing through a tiny opening into the pitch black darkness. Once Emma was safely down we all followed her lead. Next up was the flying fox, also in total darkenss, further into the earths crust. One of the young lads starting to crack. We knew this by the girlish screams we heard as he flew the fox. All safely in the cave, torches on, we were told to sit in a row with our legs dangling over a 10m drop into an underwater river. "1,2,3..." we all expected the last word to be "jump" but it was infact "tea". And yes, we all had a cup of tea down there in the darkness out of a thermos. It turned out that the river below us was only knee deep (good job we didn't jump). We were all kitted out with black inner tubes and made the leap down with those instead. All linked together we took a gentle float down the underground river with the glow worms like alien constellations twinkling above our heads. A note about glow worms; they are not worms, they are maggots, and its their poo that glows! Thank god they told us that after we had floated underneath them oohing and ahhhing at their prettiness. Now for a bit of proper caving as we discarded our rubber rings and set off upstream following the river through barely shoulder wide crevasses and holes.

A brief stop for hot squash and Ralph Harris style "can you tell what it is yet" guessing game over what shapes the stallegmites and tites were and then we started our ascent into the bright light of day. Via two waterfalls. Not the easiest thing to do in a wetsuit whilst being pummelled by gallons of water.

Back to base we shed our wetsuits. It's true when they tell you that they can tell if someone has had a pee in a wetsuit. A couple of the Kiwi Experience lads looking a bit sheepish, the smell of amonia and rubber isn't pleasant. Bless their cottons, they obviously have never been in a stunt plane, now that's scary!

To celebrate Emma overcoming her fear of caves we relaxed in the pool with a bottle of beer. We knocked up our last meal on the trangia (and marvellous it was too) and headed to the pub with a couple we had met earlier.

We had a result in the morning as we managed to flog our tent and camping paraphenalia to an English couple working at the hostel, and then we were on our way to Auckland.