Hello!

So after a fairly early morning we all loaded onto the bus and headed south to the town of Waitomo. The towns in New Zealand are so small it is unreal. There are only 4million people in the country and a third of them live in Auckland, third in the rest of the north island and a third in the south island, so driving around you see a lot of farm land and a little town every now and then. After 2 hours of driving we stopped at the Karangahake scenic reserve to explore old gold mining tunnels hidden in the mountain-side. We had to cross two large swing bridges spanning a fast flowing mountain river before heading up some large steps to the tunnels. The tunnels still had the railway tracks mounted to the floor which caused a few walking issues especially in the dark, fortunately Nikki remembered the torch so we managed to avoid any injuries. At a couple of points along the tunnel there was opening s which you could look out over the river below and over the gorge. The view was spectacular, approximately 25m above the river with the large hills above creating an amazing gorge. After an hour walking we returned to the bus and headed for Paeroa where we stopped for a supermarket break and a chance to grab some food / coffee. The town itself is "world famous in New Zealand" for producing L&P spring water drinks.

Our hostel was nice and we were in a dorm of 4. Ben and I opted to go to the caves to see the glow worms (the main attraction of this area); however we didn't want to see them in the boring way. We opted for the 'black abyss'. This involved abseiling 40ft into the mouth of the cave which was kind of reverse funnel shape which was interesting and dark! After making it down that safely we did a bit of a walk through the cave, until we got to the zip wire…As soon as you left the platform the guides turned the head lamps off and you were surrounded but hundreds of glow worms it was truly magical!! We were informed that the glow worms are actually maggots and it is their poo that glows…lovely! However you didn't have time to recover from the zip wire before you were jumping off a ledge with a rubber ring into freezing water to start floating through the cave in the dark looking at all the glow worms on the ceiling. We did have wet suits on but the water was still pretty cold and had eels in it!!! This didn't stop us though, the next stage was walking through the water in the cave, which is easier said than done, as you can't see what you are standing on so a few people fell over (ben and I stayed upright). We stopped for some hot chocolate and flapjack before they made us dive head first down a slide into the freezing water one more time! It then became apparent that we somehow had to get out the cave! Of course this wasn't going to be a nice stroll out.. no no we had to climb up three waterfalls! It wasn't too hard however the water was very strong and the space you needed to crawl through wasn't very big, but by this time we were all pro's at this caving lark and did it with no problems! At last we all saw daylight after 3 hours in the cave and were greeted with a warm shower and hot soup!

It was one of the best experiences ever and we were both so happy that we did it! It is something we will never forget and we now know we can survive cave life hehe! However it is fair to say the day's activities took it out of us as we didn't last long in the bar that night.

From Waitomo with love

Nikki, Ben and the glow worms!xx