It was like being in a caravan last night, not because it was cold but because the lads in the next room over sounded like b****** elephants slamming doors and stamping around their room. Why does it take so much noise to brush your teeth and have a pee!? The same again this morning, I hate waking up before the alarm goes off, it makes me groggy. Even more so than usual.

Early morning start to the day aswell, we had to be on the bus for 7.30am take off to Waitomo.

Karangahake gorge was our next stop for a short walk through the tunnels and over the rivers, there area is famous for and was used for gold mining a long while ago. I don’t think there was much success rate because it didn’t last very long.
The rain held of for us but it was still cold and damp. Didn’t help that we were freezing starting off because the drive had the air con on and just kept saying that it will warm up, however it did not!

We checked in at Waitomo caves and then the holiday park, the place was a little like hot water I think operated by the same people. We just had to go up to the communal toilets and showers this time around.

We got picked up for the caves around 2.45pm, just the five of us in our room. And we are all Brit’s! Got to the base and given very cold and wet wetsuits to put on along with wetsuit socks, white gum boots (wellies) and a helmet before we headed over to the “practice area” for jumping into a waterfall with our inner tube when we got into the caves. We literally had to jump backwards off a wooden ledge into a river with the inner tube held to our bums and our legs in the air. ‘Zeuss’ took my inner tube to demonstrate which only meant one thing - that I had to go first.
I am not joking when I say that the water was freezing, it must have been about 15 degrees in there and it went up my nose and gave me a brain freeze it was horrible. But fun at the same time...

Once we all had a proactive run we headed over to the entrance of the cave, basically climb down into a small hole in the ground. How people find these things I do not know! What makes people go for a walk and think oh look at that hole in the floor let’s climb in it and see if there’s a cave, oh yes this is a great cave it would be a great tourist attraction for people to throw themselves into inner tubes and float around here and climb through itty bitty tunnels... no. You must be barking mad to think of that! I mean I’m thankful to those silly barking mad people but still it just doesn’t sit in my head.

We were in here to have fun, climb through streams and tunnels and float along the inner tubes but we were also here to see glow worms. The promo photos look fab but I was definitely sure that they were photoshopped! Well... indeed they are not photoshopped! There were thousands and thousands of glow worms above us when we turned our torches off. They’re all so pretty!

Only that’s the only thing they are is pretty... and they aren’t actually worms. They’re a sort of maggot that have shiny bums to attract flies and insects that get into the cave through the water system and so they make themselves look like the night sky as stars so that their prey will fly towards them and then get stuck on their webs (that look like chandeliers hanging down from the ceiling, made from saliva, pee and poo).
They’re actually vulgar creatures, they wait for their prey to get stuck on their webs then they drill holes into their preys head whilst they’re still alive and fill it with mucus, then they wait for it die and eat it all like a big slushy. Disgusting. If that’s not enough, they only last about 9 months, they mate for 12 hours (and then the Male dies of most probably exhaustion) and then the female lays about 120 eggs with only one of them surviving because the first one that hatched eats its brothers and sisters before they get chance to hatch!

So in fact we were actually looking at very disgusting, cannibalism eating, maggots with no mercy for their prey or families. What a way to travel to see these little awful creatures!

It hadn’t occurred to me until I had to go first in the group (with everyone’s torches off) that I don’t actually like the dark... we had to get out of the cave in the pitch dark by paddling ourselves there with our hands, in the water. In the pitch dark. Ummm no I didn’t like that bit. I ended up not paddling and letting everyone else push me, getting away with it by making out that I was very slow...

One of the lads in our room wasn’t a strong swimmer but soon found out that I was a lifeguard and swimming instructor so I had a leech for most of the tour haha.

We were in the caves for a good 2 hours, surprisingly not so cold because we were constantly moving. Only when we got out of the cave and had to get on the van back to the base was it cold because we had stopped moving and I think when you know it’s over you just immediately want to be out of the situation and in a nice hot shower! Thankfully it didn’t take too long for us to get back to base wash the wetsuit and get in the most amazing hot shower in a wooden hut. Although all you could hear from everyone was screeches because our toes and fingers were so cold that they stung for ages under the shower trying to warm up.

Even better once we were showered and just about warmed up, we had free tomato soup and toasted bagels! Absolutely spot on! God I love tomato soup, phwwwwoar and buttered toasted bagel!

A quick sort out once we were back at the park and up to the local pub across the road to watch the quarter finals of wales v France and a cheeky cider.

I found a lemon tree behind our hut so I went out in the dark once everyone was asleep and picked some damn good lemons to have on the road! They’re huge too! I’m sure the park won’t mind us borrowing them for the rest of time?!