Woke up, had some porridge for breakfast and a cup of tea, got my bags and headed down to the reception to wait for my Magic Bus. It arrived at 7:40am driven by an awesome guy called Scotty. It was so cool - he played such good music all the way! We stopped at Mt. Eden on the way out of Auckland so we could get a better view of the city. WAS VERY CHILLY! It took us about 2.5hours to get to Hamilton. On the way we saw this amazing cemetary on a hill which members of the Maouri tribe are buried - the King/Queen always at the top! In Hamilton we stopped for half an hour at the visitors centre which was right next to the supermarket so I coudl FINALLY buy some apples!! Arrived in Waitomo at about 1.00pm. What a BEAUTIFUL place. The town consists of a visitors centre, pub, convenience store, hotel with the YHA situated up the road. There are few houses but mostly farms around. I checked into the Kiwi-Paka YHA which is AWESOME! No bunk beds, clean and even has a heater in the room!

Went for a walk to the village at 1:30pm to book a "Spellbound" Caves tour - ended up leaving pretty much straight away as the tour was leaving at 2pm. There was an Indian family (8 of them) from Delhi who are the FUNNIEST people i have ever met in my life! They did not stop cracking jokes all afternoon. There was also a guy called Vincent from Mont Pelier in Frnace who was really cool - we chatted all afternoon about all sorts - and lastly our tour guide Annette.

The shuttle to the cave took about 25mins where we got out and walked down a little hill, across a river to the cave entrance. We all put our mining hats on and went into the cave. About 200m in we turned off our lights. It was pitch dark - couldn't even see the back of my hand. We turned our lights back on and continued down the cave to a little raft. Here we turned off our lights again and waited for our eyes to adjust to the darkness. What you see i cannot even describe. IT IS AMAZING! OUT OF THIS WORLD AMAZING! There are glow worms lining the roof of the cave and it is like the milky way but so much better and only 5metres above your head! (The worms have an enzyme that maes their bum shine and they spin little threads which dangle off the rocks to catch flies - the flies are attracted to the light in their bums, get caught in the thread and the glow worm has dinner!)

We got off the boat in complete darkness and had to hold hands to guide ourselves out. I held hands with Vincent :o) and one of the Indian Girls. We got to the same place we turned off our lights before and could now see thousands of glow worms above us - amazing how our eyes adjust. After we left the cave we went up to a little field for some coffee and a biscuit. The next cave was lit up so we didn't need headlights - this cave had amazing rock formations (like in Margaret River) and there were lots of wide spaces called Cathedrals. Annette asked us all to sing something as the sound is AMAZING inside. I sang Nkosi Sikelele as everyone wanted a song from Africa...it felt awesome singing in that cave! Vincent and Annette sang Frere Jacques and the Indian family sang something about "India is the best!" - they kept teasing me about our bad cricket team in Zim! We made our way back to the village as the sun was setting. Could see amazing colours in the sky with Mt. Ruapehu in the distance. A perfect ending to the day!