Yesterday I hopped back on the bus nice and early with my two Austrian friends to join a new group and we headed to the famous waitomo caves. We could choose which level of activity we did in the cave, the main purpose was to sea the glow worms on the ceiling. The caves were privately owned by the farmers or whoever owned the land above it (pretty cool, you buy a house with some land and a cave is discovered; it's now yours that you can make a fortune from leasing out to the tour companies). So there were three tours you could do; the easiest was sitting in a raft (dry) and floating along the water in the caves, next was tubing in the water (wet) and then hardest requiring lots of physical effort was abseiling / rock climbing and just crawling through the water. Of course I went for the hardest one! :-) and I'm so glad I did, what a great experience it was. It was very tiring, 4 hours of squeezing through tight spaces underground, crawling through water and abseiling / climbing through the caves and waterfalls. It wasn't for anyone with claustrophobia as there were points where I thought... 'Can I fit through there?!' And some nice big heights to abseil off. We went 80m below the ground. There were some amazing sedementary rocks within the caves including stalagmites and stalagtites which we were told form at a rate of 1cm every 100 years! This cave had clearly been there a while!! Once we got to the bottom of the caves, we all sat in the water on the floor and switched our headlights out so it was pitch black. You look up to the ceiling and you see the stunning glow worms. I can only describe them as like looking at the stars on a clear night, they're beautiful. The instructors explained the worms don't digest or eat like we do but create energy via the glow. This attracts flies etc to them as they think they're going towards the light and then the glow worms eat them.
Overall, it was really cool, a great experience, one of my highlights so far.