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Published: October 11th 2009
Another rainy day was what we woke up to but we all hopped on the bus to drive to a tiny place called Waitomo. There is not much to the town but motels and hotels because this is where all the caves are. In the 1800's the caves were open to the public and now guides take people into the caves to see the famed glow worms and do some adventure caving.
Our driver dropped us off in Waitomo and we had to sign a medical form. That's never a good sign haha. But I did it anyways. Meike and I had decided to do the Tumu Tumu black water rafting adventure. Our small group was taken by van to a building in the middle of no where basically to get geared up. For those of you who know me i'm sure it will make you laugh quite hard to imagine me dressed head to toe in a wet suit.
It took I swaer 10 minutes just to get me into the thing. So we have a full wet suit on with a wet suit jacket thing on, big white rubber boots and a helmet with a light on it. So, it's still raining out and we have to walk about 15 minutes to get to the cave entrance. That just about killed me wearing all this gear that I can barely walk in haha.
The entrance to the cave is this tiny little hole with a ladder. I looked at the one guide and laughed and said "I'm not going to fit down that am I??" He said that I would. So my turn comes to go down and it's not a big area but I basically just slid down the ladder haha. So funny. Then you have to crawl over some rocks and we ended up in a bigger open area. Our guides give us a little talk and we are on our way. Sometimes we were crawling over rocks, sometimes we were walking through a bit of water.
We get to this one point and you have to get on your butt and attempt to slide through this tiny hole again and it's like a waterslide because you end up in waist deep water. At the other end the one guide takes your picture haha. BAD!!! And the water was cold! The wet suits help but still cold. SO we climb over more rocks which is not easy wearing a wet wetsuit and boots filled with water haha.
We got to the first tubing part (It's called black water rafting because you are in a black tube haha) and we have to jump backwards off a ledge into our tubes and then grab onto a rope. Once we all were in our tubes they hooked our legs onto the person in front of us and we turned our lights off. You look up and all you see looks like a very starry night sky but really it's just glow worms poop lit up haha. It's really beautiful to see though.
After this we have to get out of our tubes and climb over more rocks and then we have to swim a bit but we can't kick out feet in case we lose a boot so we are swimming with just our arms in super cold water. We got to one point and the guide was like "Do you see that light?" and i'm looking and all I see a sliver of daylight and he says thats the way out. I'm thinking this guy is crazy! But we have to climb on our stomachs and drag ourselves through and we make it out. We spent about 2 hours down in the cave. After everyone was out we had to climb a little hill to get back to the building where hot showers were waiting for us.
It was one of the coolest experiences of my life because it's something I never would have done back at home and really it was physically really really tough but I somehow managed to push through the pain and do it. When we got back, thats when they tell us about the big eels that are swimming in the water with us down there. NOT COOL!!!! I'm really really glad that I didn't see one.
Fun fun though!! I don;d have any pictures from it since they wont let you take a camera down with you and I don't have a waterproof one anyways. But I do have a group picture of all of us before we left.
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Daddio
non-member comment
Glad you survived!
Wow-- I think you 'pushed the envelope' with this activity. Congratulations! I'm proud of you!-- even if you scare me!