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Published: January 30th 2005
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The exit to our blackwater rafting cave
Yes, I know it just looks like a black hole here... The alarm went off unbelievably early and for a moment neither of us could remember why - surely it wasn’t Friday again? No, thank goodness, it was definitely Saturday, and (even better) the Auckland holiday weekend, which meant three days off instead of two, a hire care to be collected and places to be visited. So armed with our trusty backpack, our chilly bag (couldn’t quite stretch to a whole bin) of food, and a credit card, we collected said car and headed off into the wide blue yonder. Well, Hamilton, two hours south of Auckland, to be precise. We had a lunch date with my second cousin once removed, whom I had never met before.
Lunch turned out to be lovely - despite never having met me before, Iain and his wife Sue were very welcoming, and we had a lovely lunch with them and Sue’s dad and his wife. It was hot and sunny, and we were able to sit in their lovely garden and chat about family, the universe and everything.
Later in the day we returned to the car and our quest for the wide blue yonder. Our sweets had melted in the heat of
the car, so we had to make do with water for the hour-long drive to Te Awamutu - the hometown of Neil and Tim Finn (of Crowded House fame, for the uninitiated!) OK, so Te Awamutu isn’t much of a town, and there wasn’t much to see or do, but we were able to stretch our legs on the walk to the tourist information centre, where I bought postcards depicting the famous brothers, and a pen with their names on it. Sad, I know! We also got to chat to the lovely old lady who works there, whose father is from Bathgate and who’s uncles’ initials are graffiti-ed into a railway bridge in Fauldhouse. Bizarre!
Sadly Neil and Tim weren’t in town to play me some Crowded House songs, so we got back in the car and headed for Waitomo. Waitomo is famous for its huge network of underground tunnels and caves, formed by water eroding the limestone landscape - another Geography teacher’s paradise!! We checked into our hostel, then went out to explore. Waitomo village turned out not to be a village at all, but an hotel, two hostels, a pub, a shop and three tourist information centres.
No houses, few people. Faced with a limited choice of evening entertainment, we headed for the pub. Several beers later it was time for bed - another early start the next morning.
After a good night’s sleep it was back into the car to drive the 2 km to the home of The Legendary Black Water Rafting Company. These people invented something called Black Water Rafting, which we’d heard was a lot of fun and not
too dangerous. We donned the regulation wetsuit, helmet and rubber boots, then were packed into a bus with ten other mad people who weren’t quite sure what they were getting into…
It turned out that we had signed up for a whole lot of fun. We were given rubber inner tubes (our ‘rafts’) - ones that fitted neatly round our bums. We were then given the ‘technical training’ - jumping backwards into a small river wearing our inner tubes round our bums (very attractive!), before being driven to the start of our cave. We all clambered into a big cavern, where we spent five minutes while our eyes adjusted to the darkness. We could hear water, we just couldn’t see it -
The lovely Marokopa Falls
Luckily they were only a 10 minute walk from the car, as it was extremely hot outside yet! The rafting turned out to be floating on our inner tubes down an underground river - no tight squeezes, no abseiling, and no near death experiences. We floated through a cave covered in millions of glow-worms (imagine fairy lights on a dark ceiling), jumped backwards off a couple of underground waterfalls, marvelled at the stalactites and stalagmites, and gazed at the amazing patterns that water has eroded into the cave walls. Sadly there are no pictures to mark the event (you’ve seen enough pictures of us doing mad things!), but we did get one of our instructor Carl at the end of the cave later that day (we went back to do the bushwalk near the caves and saw an afternoon group at the end of their adventure). Here's the link to their site if you want more of an idea - lots of good photos on it http://www.blackwaterrafting.co.nz/cgi-bin/ecards/.
Following our underground adventure, we had an over ground adventure in search of a waterfall and a natural limestone bridge. We found both, and had a couple of wee walks in the extreme heat (and extreme hayfever for me…)
We had a quiet night with some more beers
More limestone formations
These were on another 'bushwalk' and they had 35 000 year old oyster shell fossils in them as this area used to be underwater. and a pizza, looking forward to our next adventure…
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