Black Water Rafting in Waitomo

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Day 557 (06/10/08) (...continued)

New Zealand is full of incredible natural wonders and many enthusiasts for the extreme. So if there's a scenic sight to be seen you can bet that there's at least one extreme way of viewing it. A beautiful river for example may be jet boated along, skydived over, bungee jumped into...etc. Our natural wonder for today was to be the caves in Waitomo famed not only for their stunning rock formations but for the glowworms that have made them their home. We'd be going the extreme viewing route today by going black water rafting through them thanks to Jean and Mike who'd given us some money when they'd left us and told us to 'do something we usually wouldn't' with it. We didn't think they meant going for coffee (although we don't usually do that) so we'd gone for this option.

Having left Turangi earlier than planned we hadn't booked a tour and arrived in Waitomo in the continuing rain at lunchtime luckily able to book onto a trip at 4pm. With the afternoon to kill and nothing really to do in Waitomo in the rain we found a hostel had some lunch and read our books whilst we waited.

Back at the Legendary Black Water Rafting Co. we were joined by a few other people and went to get kitted up for our trip. The water running through the caves is about 10 degrees at the moment so we had an undertop, wet suit booties, a full wettie, some little welly boots and a helmet with light making us look stunning!

We were bused down to the caves, picked our 'raft', an inner tube that we would sit in to float through the caves, and before we knew it we were clambering in though the cave entrance. Over the next hour or so we walked and floated through underwater streams and rivers, dodged beautiful stalactites and stalagmites, jumped off a couple of heavily flowing waterfalls, negotiated our way through low ceilinged tunnels lying right back on our tubes and drifted along in the pitch dark marvelling at the hundreds of starlike glowworms twinkling in the cave roof above us - an incredible experience - thanks so much to Mum and Dad Hayward!

Despite pretty cold hands we would have loved to have stayed in the caves longer but back at base we were glad to partake in the hot showers and soup and a bagel included in the tour.

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