We got to Waitomo on Wednesday and I booked onto the Lost World 7 hour epic, 100 metre abseil and river caving adventure for Thursday at 10am even though it had been raining nonstop for almost 2 days. The 100 metre abseil was really good; you controlled the speed you descended so you could look around at the scenery all the way down. When we got to the bottom of the abseil and made our way to the cave entrance the water was hitting 81cm on their gauge, the cut off point for the trip was 85cm so they decided to take us in. The force of the water was very strong from the start and as we got further in it got stronger and stronger. I was almost washed away twice as the water had risen too high for me to touch the floor in many places. In one place you had to pull yourself along a rope that was already in the water, but the water had risen so much when I grabbed the rope my head was under the water, and in my panic to get my head back out from under the water I lost one of my wellies. About halfway in there was a part that you had to climb up above the water and back on yourself a bit to a small funnel shaped hole about 10 feet above the fast flowing water underneath, what you had to do was stand over the hole, everybody turned off their head torches so it was completely black, and then you just dropped through the hole into the water, one of the guides then turned his torch on as soon as you hit the water (but you didn't know he was going to do this) and grabbed you as you came backup before the water washed you downstream.

After surviving that we carried on making our way up the cave, with the water getting deeper and the current getting stronger, we then came to a 6 meter sink hole where they had to strap up onto safety lines and pull us across as if you got sucked into that the only way your going is down.By the time we were two thirds of the way the water had risen too far and blocked our planned exit so we had to go back out the way we came. Going back you could see how much the water had risen as some of the parts we crawled through coming up were now underwater so we had to go over them. The force of the water by now was much more than when we came into the cave and in parts the instructors had to just pass us between them one at a time due to the force of the water. We finally got out of the cave about 4 hours later, with one welly missing and a sore foot, as all that was on it was a thin wetsuit type sock.

When we got to the end of the cave they checked the water levels and it was at 90cm, it had risen almost 10cm since we went in, but they said that in the narrow cave the water would have gone up between 30 and 40cm, no wonder I was struggling to touch the floor in most places.

We were now almost back to the bottom of the abseil but that was a down only way so we had to climb out on ladders. The first ladder was a 30 metre vertical metal ladder with small round runs all that were wet, muddy and slippery.The first half of the ladder my foot with no shoe was killing me as I climbed up, but I soon forgot about that as my arms and shoulders starting hurting and my hands were struggling to hold on. I eventually made it to the top, thankfully the remaining ladders were shorter and more like 45 degrees.When I finally got back to the centre I had a welcome shower and BBQ food.

By the time I got back to the hostel it was about 7.30pm, I had two cups of coffee a bottle of lager and went to bed knowing I was going to ache all over the next day.