After picking up the campervan the first and most important thing to do was rush to the supermarket and spend a fortune on filling the fridge! New Zealand has a lot more familiar foods than South America so we had great fun buying lots of our favourite food. After overloading the campervan we headed south towards Waitomo where we wanted to visit the Waitomo caves, we didn't want to travel too far on our first day so we stopped over in a place called Raglan on the East coast. This is a famous place for surfers to visit and has some lovely beaches. We spent our first night sorting the Campervan out, unpacking clothes and trying to organise everything so it doesn't go flying across the van every time we turn a corner. During our first night we realised the TV doesn't work, the tap for the sink occasionally spurts out a few drops of water every now and again, the frying pan has a dodgy handle that flips the contents on to the floor, we don't have a hose to fill up the water tank, on a night the bugs invade the campervan and the toilet trip in the night is a bl**dy nightmare! Other than these things all was good - Happy campers!!

The next morning we went to see Bridal Veil Falls which was beautiful. We noticed a sign for it and thought we would have a quick stopover, and we were glad we did. After a ten minute walk we were stood at the top of the falls which dropped 50 metres in to a lagoon at the bottom. We walked to the bottom of the falls and would have loved to go for a swim but there was a warning sign for dangerous poisons in the water which was a shame.

We arrived at Waitomo where the famous glowworm caves are and booked a Blackwater Rafting tour for the afternoon. Lisa was a little nervous about caving as she has never been a fan of tiny spaces in water where you can get stuck and die but decided to do it because Ben made her and she wanted to see the pretty glowworms. There were 7 of us in our group with 2 guides and we started the tour by climbing down a ladder into a tiny hole in the ground, it was pitch black and there was running water at the bottom. Straight away we saw stalactites and stalagmites all around us and a few glowworms glittering on the ceiling above. We were guided through the caves with water up to our ankles and needing to crouch a little bit so that we didn't knock ourselves out, this seemed quite easy Lisa's nerves started to go away. Obviously the beginning part was just a way of gently easing us in to the rest of the 4 hour trip, throughout the trip we found ourselves crawling through spaces which were too narrow to crawl through forwards, you needed to lay on your side and keep your head down otherwise you would have found yourself wedged in between two rocks laying in icy cold water! Some of the holes we had to climb through were tiny and we were surprised we actually fit through them! The rest of the trip involved swimming through the caves and floating on tubes through the caves observing the thousands of glowworms which were glittering above us! The guide told us the term "glowworm" is in fact a marketing ploy and they are actually "glow maggots" they glow a green colour and the glow comes from the maggot poo that they store at the back of their bodies which is being burnt, hence glowing! So really we were laying back on our tubes admiring the thousands of maggots above us and staring at their green poo - lovely!! After 4 hours in the cave we returned to the top bought some souvenir photos and headed on our way towards Matamata the home of LoTR's hobbit holes!