Up there on 'some of the best things we have done in New Zealand' has to be our trip to Waitomo caves. We went with a company called Rap, Raft & Rock because they were considerably cheaper than the other operaters!!! and claimed to do everything the other companies did at a cheaper rate...

The night before our trip we stayed in the nearest town to Waitomo which was Te Kuiti. I wouldn't reccomend this town...it was really run down and the kind of place where you have to pay for your petrol before you fill up! We woke up the following morning to quite heavy rain and thought that the trip may have been cancelled but it wasn't. This left me slightly concerned about the rising water levels in the cave but we were assured that the cave was safe! Our guide Simon telling us horror stories about flooded caves in Thailand didn't help ease the knot that was gowing in my stomach though!!!

It was a 15 minute drive from the office to the 'changing rooms' where we donned an ever so attractive wet suit, hard hat and gum boots (wellies!). Just to add to the fashion, we had to wear scummy trousers over our legs to protect the wet suit! From here we were taken to the cave entrance which happened to be 30m off the cave floor. We were fitted with harnesses then Simon briefly showed us how to abseil which was a lot easier than we had imagined! One at a time we abseiled into the darkness...! When we reached the bottom, we were stood knee deep in water. It was quite noisey as the water was running quite fast and the only way out was up a cliff face. I can quite safely say that i was scared!!! Simon was the last person down so we had to wait for him. We were then told to switch on our head lights as we entered the cave!! It was difficult to walk against the flowing water and i had visions of being swept away into the darkness...Simon was behind us all the time though and i'm sure he would have caught anyone who might have fallen... It was soon time to do some Black Water Rafting which involved sitting in your ring and tubing back down the river we had just tried so hard to fight! It was quite fast because of all the rain and Neil managed to fall out! Simon had to catch us all when he wanted us to stop...! We found a dry bank of land to dump our rings on so that we could go futher into another part of the cave. My knees were like jelly because the water was so strong and i was worried about the water levels rising with the rain...of course it was just paranoia!!! On our little adventure through the cave we had to crawl underneath a ledge, which resulted in getting water right down into our wetsuits, and crawl through tiny holes on our hands and knees until we reached a larger cave. When we turned off our lights, there were hundreds of glowworms above us! Simon told us about the different stages of the glow worms life and how the light they give off is due to burning excrement....i think i mentioned all of this when we went to the caves in Whangarei so i won't go through it again...! It all very fascinating anyway! When we got back to our rings, we were able to tube all the way back to the entrance and beyond. I didn't really see the point in letting the water take us past the exit because we were then told that we would have to cut the trip short and head back as the water levels were getting too high. This just ment that we had to fight our way back through the water! When we reached the 'hole' and the outside world was visible again, we were given a hot drink and some chocolate!! We were then once again fitted into our harnesses and we had to climb out! I was very relieved when i made it to the top! Back at the office we were given some hot soup and shown the photos that Simon had taken....we weren't allowed to take cameras in to the cave. I thought we might have been given the photo CD for free as our trip was cut short by an hour but we weren't!