A Million Sparkling Lights

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Day 100
14th December

Yeah, the rain did last, in fact it was pouring it down. Fortunately this wasn’t the end of the world for us as we were going into a cave! It was time to do our first New Zealand wedding present and we were going to visit the famous Waitomo glow worm caves.

Although these caves had been known to the Maori for hundreds of years, they had never explored them until they took English surveyor, Fred Mace into the cave system. They found an amazing set of caves populated by glow worms and eventually it was opened up to the public so they could see the amazing sight.

Like the last blog, we were not allowed to take photos of this experience, for a different reason though! Glow worms are highly sensitive to light and noise and this makes them dim their lights, which kind of defeats the point of going into the caves really! However, unlike the last blog, we are free to describe it in as much detail as we like!

So we turned up and bought two tickets to go into the glow worm cave. The first part of the tour takes you through the caves so you can see the amazing stalactite and stalagmite formations, they are massive and considering they grow only a few millimetres a year, you can imagine how long they take to form! This led us through to the cathedral, a huge cavern where the acoustics are so good they hold concerts in here. People such as Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and P Diddy have performed here! Our guide gave us a rendition of Jason Mraz ‘I’m Yours’ to demonstrate. They are good! We then went deeper into the cave to an overhanging bit. There didn’t seem to be anything there but our guide switched off the lights and there they were, the glow worms! I don’t think anything can prepare you for this one, to be plunged into darkness and suddenly there are thousands of little lights all over the ceiling like stars, it was so beautiful! We also got to see them in the light, they are definitely not as pretty, basically long strings of what looks like spit hanging from the roof. They use the lights to attract bugs who then fly towards the light and get caught in the sticky strings.

Next was a boat ride deep into the caves, we were warned to be very quiet as noisy disturbs them. Pretty simple to follow, no? Obviously not, when we got in the boat these tourists behind us started talking very loudly, Ellory and I were getting really annoyed as we really wanted to see more glow worms so we turned round and told them to shut up! Haha, we didn’t hear a word out of them after that! We could see that the guide was getting a bit cross so we thought we’d do our bit to help! So once everyone had stopped being noisy the guide grabbed the rope that guides the boat through the caves and off we went. It was quite eerie at first being in the dark with no sound apart from the water lapping the boat. We went round a corner there they were, the glow worms, and it was amazing, much better than what we had just seen, the closest I can come to describing it is the night sky, when you are in a desert, miles away from civilisation. All you can see is the blackness with a million tiny lights. In a selfish way, I wish we could have taken photos so you could see, it was just so beautiful. It was all over too soon sadly and we emerged into the daylight and our tour was over.

Wendy and Allen, thank you so much for the second part of the wedding present, it was fantastic! Definitely a highlight of New Zealand.

A bit dazed from what we had seen we sat down for a bit to work out what to do next. We had heard from Ellory’s sister, Ella. She had arrived in Auckland and wanted to see us! We had planned to drive back via Hahei on the Coromandel Peninsular as Ellory fancied doing some snorkelling, so although it was a bit of a detour, we decided to drive up to Hahei for the night and head back to Auckland at lunchtime the next day after we had been snorkelling to meet with Ella in the afternoon. So we got back in the fun van and headed off. The sat nav behaved itself this time and by the time we reached Hahei, the rain had stopped, yay! We stopped on the beach for a bit and enjoyed the beautiful views of the Pacific then headed to a campsite nearby where we could hear the ocean as we slept, very nice indeed! After a dinner of pot noodles, (nice) we settled in for the night.

Love Liz xxx

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