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Published: March 16th 2009
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Kuirau Park
The small hut in the back ground is a public BBQ After only an hours drive from Taupo i arrived in Rotorua and just a 3 minute walk down the road was my hostel. I was told that i couldn't check in and put my bags in my room as the room wouldn't be ready until 2pm and it was only 11am so i decided to go for a walk to pass the time. The first thing i noticed when getting off the coach was the over powering smell of rotten eggs!!!! The smell comes from the sulphur in the air as Rotorua is a hive of geothermal activity and is dotted with hundred of geysers, thermal springs and hot mud pools, so i thought I'd take a look around the local park which is next to the hostel as it was home to many of these. As i wandered around i could see vast plumes of steam rising from the ground and bubbles surfacing on the ponds, as i walked further on i noticed some buildings where they were channeling the hot water into so visitors could soak their feet in the hot spring water. Rotorua has been a spa town and major tourist resort since the 1800s and in the
1930's local women would wash their clothes in the hot water, i also saw a hot spring that was called lobster pool as it turned anyone with fair skin bright red and it was very popular and kids would jump in the there on the way home from school. Some of the springs and mud pools were huge and one in particular was more like a small lake, that is at least when you could see it through all the steam and smoke coming off its surface. I wandered around the park for several hours and every time i thought of turning back i spotted another plume of smoke a little further in the distance so I'd walk to it and before i knew it was 4pm so i headed back to the hostel, checked in and sorted out various things before having an early night (by early i mean 8:30pm!)
The reason for the early night was also one of the reasons i stopped in Rotorua and that was to visit Waitomo on a day trip. Waitomo is famous for its mass of cave networks that run all over the small town and what makes these caves better
then most is they have huge numbers of glow worms in them. I was picked up outside the hostel at 7:15am and after picking up some more people we left Rotorua around half 7, it took just over 2 hours to drive to Waitomo and i arrived just in time for the briefing. The trip I'd booked was called TumuTumu Toobing and it combined the best elements of caving, climbing, swimming and black water rafting, the cave was only a ten minute drive from the main building and after getting kitted out in a very attractive two piece wetsuit and wellies we walked to the cave entrance. To get down into the caves we descended a ladder through a pretty tight gap and as i was at the front of the group i went first, when i got to the bottom the guide told me to follow the water until i got to a yellow marker on the left and wait there. I slightly miss understood her and headed left along the water and ended up going in the wrong direction into a very tight gap, this was made worse as there was only the light of my head lamp
and after realising my mistake i followed the cave wall until i got to the yellow marker.
Once we were all at the marker we turned our head lamps off and i saw my first glimpse of the glow worms, it was like looking up at the night sky only the lights had a slight bluey tint to them, it was beautiful but we didn't hang around for long and i was soon scrambling over rocks and squeezing through tunnels to get further into the cave. After a little while of wading through waist high water we got to the first tubing point, black water rafting isn't like white water rafting underground in fact the water hasn't got much of a current to it at all, we had the option of getting into the water by sliding off the edge on our tubes or by jumping of a ledge backwards into the water with our tubes, so obviously i chose the second option and launched myself with such force i got drenched in ice cold water and ended up with water up my nose. We then got in a conga style line and turned off our head lamps and
quietly drifted along the water whilst staring up at the ceiling that was a wash with tiny little dots of light from the glow worms, it was really spectacular and almost didn't seem real because it was hard to think that nature could create such an amazing sight.
After a while the water became too shallow to float on so we got out of our tubes and stopped at a place suitably named 'Hard Rock Cafe' for a hot drink of lemon toddy and a chocolate fish or fush as it sounds when a kiwi says it, we then carried on further into the cave the whole time still seeing the bright dots of light emanating from the ceiling and got to a point where the water was getting deeper but it was too narrow to float in the tubes so we had to swim, the water was even colder then before but we were soon out of the water again and moving so much that i warmed up pretty quickly. Our guide explained that the glow worms weren't actually worms they were larvae similar to maggots and they make the light from burning their poo as they can't
poo it out as they don't bums, so instead they produce a chemical that reacts with their poo causing it to glow, this is how they attract flying insects to them which are drawn to the light mistaking it as the night sky, once the insects fly towards the glow worm they get caught in one of the many threads similar to the ones that spiders make, the glow worm then reels the insect in to eat it. In reality then what i was gazing up at was maggot poo but i have to say it was the best maggot poo i've ever seen, we scrambled over more rocks and squeezed through impossibly small gaps until we got to another deep bit that we had to swim through and then a part we floated through on our tubes before reaching the exit.
Before we headed towards the light out guide pointed out an insect that was in a small crevice to the side of us, i couldn't see anything until he shone his torch and then the walls seemed to move! The creatures were called wetters and they looked like nothing i had ever seen before, everyone was trying
Scented Gardens
I thought this was rather ironic as the only thing you could smell was the sulphur to get a better view of them until the guide told us they could jump over 2 meters and within seconds everyone backed off and headed up the rocks to the exit. I had an absolutely fantastic time in Waitomo but i was so exhausted by the time i left, because of the conditions underground we weren't allowed to take our cameras with us but the guide took some pictures of us and we could buy them afterwards which i did, though i was pretty disappointed with them as there are only two and one is really blurry, i was also told there were some photos of the cave on the disc that came with the photos but it had only one picture of the glow worms and it wasn't when they were glowing and all the photos had people that weren't even on my group but they give an impression of what it was like and other then that i thought the trip was brilliant. I had a great two days in Rotorua and Waitomo and I'd love to go back especially to Waitomo as there are lots of other things you can do there. Next i am off
to Auckland which unfortunately is my last stop in New Zealand before flying on to Thailand and soon home.
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