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Published: March 16th 2009
Having had such a great time up in the Bay of Islands, I was really looking forward to the next few weeks travelling on Magic bus. Even though for the first week I am going to be covering a lot of the country that I have already visited, I have a feeling I going to enjoy it in a whole new way.
So having left Auckland once again but this time heading south into ‘King Country’ we headed to our first destination known as the ‘The Waitomo caves’. These caves offer so many great tours and activities that it was a really hard decision which one to choose, there was the usual caving and potholing etc but there was also this 8 hour tour which is called ‘the lost world’ which you abseil 150 meters in to this pitch black cave, then climb and pothole deeper through the cave network before climbing out some few kilometers away. As much as this was really appealing it was stupidly expensive so I settled for the black water rafting, along with half the bus. I have been told by many people including Dan who has done it 3 times know that it is
Mt Doom from Lord of the rings
I really wanted to climb this too, but it was gonna be another 2 hours of very hard climbing awesome fun and well worth doing.
Just to make it clear, it is nothing like white water rafting, for starters you are given this small rubber inner tube and then lead into the caves, we followed one another deeper and deeper underground and through many tiny gaps (there are very few times that being tall is a disadvantage but caving is defiantly not one of them) so after having a few things explained to us about how these caves were formed etc, we started to find the underground streams. Right about now due to some light sensitive insects in this part of the cave we all had to turn our head torch’s off and stand with both feet in the middle of the rubber ring. With our right hand we had to keep contact with the wall and with the left we had to grab the shoulder of the person in front and then do this very silly shuffle though absolute pitch blackness. The whole time I kept thinking that at any minute someone is gonna trip while having the inner tube around there ankles and 20 odd people are gonna fall over like a series of dominoes. Luckily
this didn’t happen even though I kept thinking it would have been hilarious to see. So anyway as we shuffled along in the pitch blackness guided only by the person in front of us, the water we were walking in started to get deeper and deeper until it got real deep and this small Irish girl was starting to panic that her head was only just level with the water, this is one of those times again that been tall is an advantage. We finally got to this waterfall and in turn all jump off the top and land in our ring which was well funny, as most people who jumped, landed in there ring and then a straight away bounced right back out of it again. Having now jumped off this waterfall we were now in deeper water and so the guide made us in sit in our inner tubes and hook out feet under the arms of the person in front, so when finished we ended up a huge line of people sat with their ass in the middle of their inner tubes holding onto the wellies of the person behind. All head torches were turned off and
we floated in absolute darkness though the caves. It was totally different to what I was expected but bloody hilarious, I don’t know why but it was just so funny and so different to what everyone was expecting but we all had a awesome laugh especially when the guide set a banger off and scared the shit out of us ha ha. I couldn’t believe how dark it was, to coin the expression not being able to see the hand in front of your face, well I tried that and couldn’t see anything including my hand!
Actually that’s not strictly true as the Waitomo caves are also mostly know for their ‘glow worms’ these are strange little worms that live on the ceilings of the caves and emit an luminous glow. There are hundreds of thousands of them in this whole network of caves and there are really impressive, as we were floating though the tunnel not having a clue where we were we all looked up and seen what can only be described this most amazing luminous green looking starry night!!! Apparently they emit this glow to fool other insects in the cave that there is a spec of
day light and so the insects fly straight into the glow worm which then consequently gets eaten!
After floating though here for a while and seeing 1000’s upon 1000’s of these glow worms we got to another small waterfall and were finally able to put the lights back on and we were greeted with this slide into a black abyss where we couldn’t actual see where the slide ended! So of course we all had to slide down this before we could finish the tour and walk back for a much needed warm soup and shower.
I would having loved to have done the 150 m abseil but the black water rafting was definably well worth doing and an awesome laugh even though there wasn’t a rapid in sight, definitely a unique experience.
Leaving Waitomo we headed for a night in Rotorua before going south towards Taupo. Here we had a quick stop and ‘Rock’n’Ropes’ which is the little area with load’s of ropes and huge wooden poles etc. Here you are able to climb and walk along highly suspended activities to get over you fear of heights or more likely scare the crap out of you -
New Zealanders seem to love doing this!
There were a number of things you could do but only me a Sarah (a Canadian girl on the bus) decided to do anything, so we opted to have a go on the swing. It was only a 15 meter high swing and so technically nothing compared to the 109 meter one I did in Queentown, but as we climbed up to the top, all I can say is that it looked a heck of a lot higher than I did from the ground! Well we did jump off it and it was a lot better than I had expected, even got quite a rush from the free fall.
The only reason way I really did this was because I had finally put my name down to do a bungee jump - the one thing I still hadn’t got around to since I started to travel. So to me this was little adrenaline kick to get me prepared for the main event - the Taupo Bungee.
So off we headed at once again and yet again I was only one of 2 from the bus that were going to be
doing it. I have said from the start I wanted to do it here in Taupo as it’s such a beautiful setting (as you can see from the pic’s) but also you can get dunked In the river below, which was really appealing for some unknown reason ha ha.
Well we finally got there and I got all strapped in and just walked, well more shuffled up to the edge and looked down to the beautiful emerald green water below, then had that spilt second thought of ‘what the hell am I doing…. why Charlie, why???’, then thought with a moment of clarity - bollox to it, lets just get this over and done with and jumped!! I couldn’t believe how comparatively slow it felt compared to the Canyon swing, it was so gentle and smooth and not scary at all. Although while you are hanging upside down the blood rushing to your head doesn’t half pound!!
It was an awesome experience and I am so glad I have finally done it, but pound for pound the skydive or canyon swing is far better value for money. Oh yeah gotta try bungee jumping out of a helicopter next to
really properly evaluate them ha ha. But it was really good and I think everyone should at least try it once as it really isn’t that scary - Guy, Martyn, Tom up for the challenge??
The next day a few of us had booked ourselves to do the Tangariro alpine crossing which is advertised as being ‘the best one day walk in New Zealand’ and how right there were. It was 19.4 km walk which you walk up the side and then in between 2 active volcanoes (one of which erupted in 1996!) meanwhile nearly ascending 1000metres in altitude.
The walk was said to take around 8 hours and due to it being a 1.5 hour drive from where we were staying in Taupo, we had a stupidly early start. By the time we were dropped off to start the walk the sun was just coming up and it was bitterly cold as we were already at an elevation of 1800 meters!! The first couple of hours were hard walking as we twisted our way through the valley and then up the very steep ‘devils staircase’. I had initially planned to hike fast with my mate Rowan and
then hope to able to also complete an additional side walk to climb to the summit of Mt Ngauruhoe, but we decided we would give it a miss and instead walked with 2 others from the bus Sarah and Helen. Mt Ngauruhoe is also known as Mt Doom from Lord of the Rings!!!! This way we could really take our time and enjoy the spectacular scenery which was really like nothing I have ever walked across before - the views from the top were breath taking.
Right at the top there was this huge red dusty bowl which is known as the ‘red crater’ and just over from this, where we stopped for lunch were the incredibly coloured emerald lakes. From here we could see so much - Mt Tananaki on the west coast (a good few hundred km’s away), could see the distant mountains next to Taupo. And then just the area all around us, it was so different it could have been the moon for all I knew!
The whole walk took us just over 7 hours which wasn’t bad considering we had plenty of stops to sit down and checkout the views. It was amazing
how every hour or so the landscape completely changed from one type of terrain to another. Like climbing up bare rock and boulders then in the way back down the other side going through native bush looking out of many multi-coloured lakes etc.
We were really lucky as the weather was perfect, due to it being an alpine walk at such altitude the weather can be very unpredictable and can change without warning. Only a week or so before they had snow up there. We really couldn’t have had it better and the following day as we caught the bus down to Wellington we stopped by the road side for a pic opportunity of the volcanoes but it was so cloudy and dark that you couldn’t even see them.
I have really have had the most exciting couple of days, I have now complete the 2 biggest activities I have been waiting to do since arriving in NZ and feel so pleased to have completed the Tangariro crossing and do a bungee now. If this is the taster of the weeks to come I can’t wait, I am having the best time I have had since arriving in
NZ!!! Role on the South island and the Abel Tasman!!
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