Street sheep and glowing maggots

---

As we’ve previously mentioned, our visit to Te Kuiti had the happy coincidence of being at the same time as the annual Sheep Muster Festival and Sheep Shearing Championships, awesome. So not knowing what to expect from the day (apart from the obvious, a lot of sheep) we left our dreary campsite for the short drive into town. The whole of the main street through town had been closed off for the day, a stage was set up with bands playing and dance groups doing their best to fit 20 people on a tiny stage and dance without falling off. Oh, and most importantly of all there were dozens of ridiculously cheap and tasty food stalls, good times!

So we spent the morning munching on bbq’d meats, well Matt did anyway and window shopping around the stalls. They held a ‘rubber duck race’ down the local river which was interesting to watch - lots of people getting het up about their duck number getting to the front, then getting stuck on a branch at the river edge. I headed in to see the semi-finals of the Open Shearing Finals whilst Cate took a time-out in Bertha to recover from a particularly strong bout of homesickness and frustration with the whole travelling malarkey. It was strange because only the previous day, Matt was saying that he was pretty fed up with travelling at that point, to quote “It’s becoming a bit of a drag!” I felt that it was fine, then the next day I had had my fill of it and was completely ready for home. I think maybe his negativity had rubbed off on me! Watching a line of six burly looking men tackle sheep after sheep after sheep, trying to shave them as quickly as possible was a particularly surreal experience which was only accentuated by the very raucous crowd watching the event.

We mooched around the market stores selling anything and everything then stood in line next to a fence waiting along with many other people for the sheep to be let loose in the street. I’m not really sure what to think about that event. I mean, it was quite warm and there were A LOT of sheep - they were running along, came to the end of the barricade and turned back then ran in once huge circle. They looked hot and flustered and some were jumping up on top of others to do what I could only expect them to do - get some air. They let sheep run along the street every year - no shade, nothing. I don’t really get it - it seemed a bit cruel I suppose. So after we’d had enough of that, we jumped into Bertha and drove to Waitomo and checked into possibly the nicest Top 10 holiday park we’d been to on our whole trip. It was mid afternoon, the sun was shining and we sat out on the slanted field with a bottle of beer each, watching a rugby match on a lower field. Lovely. It was so so so good to sit out in the sunshine - we didn’t get too much of that in New Zealand and certainly needed a pick-me up. After a drive back to Te Kuiti to the ‘local’ supermarket, (they don’t have any in Waitomo) to buy some dinner - more potato goods with veg, we returned to the holiday park and chilled out there for the evening.

The following morning we got up and took our swimwear and towels with us to Waitomo Adventures which was just down the road and our entertainment for the day. We had booked onto a half day tubing/caving experience which involved us getting into some particularly sexy looking, 10mm thick wetsuits and jackets, booties, helmets and white wellington (gum) boots. Brilliant. There were only six of us in our group with one female guide Sarah, and the youngest of us was a child called Tully. How cool is that? Nice kid too. We were taken by minibus to a cave that the company rents from the farmer who owns the land, changed into our lovely gear, and walked about a kilometre to a hole in the ground. It was pretty narrow which was a sign of things to come I suppose, and we had to climb down a ladder, one by one into pure darkness. We all had little head torches on our helmets but they weren’t very strong so they didn’t cast much light over the area. It seemed quite cold down in the cave, and very dark as I said. We were walking through ankle deep water from the very start and there were rocks on the ground which really tested our balancing skills. We got to see some very old stalagmites and stalactites (one of which was about 5,000 years old...apparently you can work out their age from the length of them) and they were surprisingly heavy. As we stood under a huge section of them, all hanging like daggers above our heads, Sarah told us that this one particular stalactite that was standing on the ground in the mud, had been overhead one morning but had fallen by the afternoon and was set, heavy and deep into the mud. I’m really glad we weren’t there when it fell. It would have killed a grown man - it was huge.

We sloshed mud all over our face (which was the beauty treatment ahead of the adrenaline activity), got skirting through some tiny and I mean really tiny spaces (with our lights off to try to stop the fear from overtaking) and eventually came to a section of the cave which was full of water - in sections it would have been much deeper than our height - we didn’t find out as we were given a large rubber ring, asked to climb up a rock, put the ring around our backsides, held on tight to it and jumped backwards off the rock into the water. It made the biggest crashing sound and splash, but was great fun (although not everyone would do it) and then we got to lie back, look up to the cave roof and be pulled along backwards in a human chain of tubes and people. Once again, brilliant. Above us was what was described to us as ‘canibalistic shiny-shitting maggots,’ the thing that you and I know by the name of ‘glow worms.’ Basically glow-worms are actually maggots not worms (as they’re larvae, that later cocoon and turn into flies), the part of them that glows is actually bioluminescence going from their poo, oh and their food supply is the flies that they turn into ... cannibalistic, shiny-shitted maggots. Glow-worm sounds nice though. They were pretty spectacular looking, like stars on a very starry night and as our eyes adjusted to them, we could see more and more appearing.

During that adventure we also got to swim in the freezing cold cave water - I could physically feel my body slowing down and my lungs felt restricted as I lowered myself into that water, the water slipped inside my wetsuit and I tried to swim along the length of that section of the cave. Sarah was right in telling us before that it was ‘something that we just had to get over with.’ It was difficult but at the end of it we had a lovely hot and sweet lemon barley drink waiting for us and a chocolate covered marshmallow bar. Yum yum, just what the doctor ordered. After a short break, we were off again, looking for crazy rock formations, trudging through mud and cold water, climbing along jagged rocks, swimming some more, squeezing down more tiny passages, tubing and staring at glow-worms. It was an incredibly cool thing to do and I can’t explain to you how beautiful the light looked when we climbed out of the cave on large wide rocks. We climbed out, past some ‘wetas’ - disgusting, large creatures a cross between crickets and grasshoppers, into a forest where the trees looked so green, and the sunlight looked so bright. What a great experience - a real highlight of New Zealand.

Well there’s not much to say that Cate hasn’t already said ... the only thing I’ve got to add is that it was a damn good job that they gave Cate a helmet, as she finds it hard enough not to bang her head in wide open spaces let alone underground! One of my favourite moment in the caves was hearing Cate coming up behind me giggling before saying “Hehe, I’ve just banged my CLONK owww!” literally banging her head as she told me about her previous smash. Yeah that particular time, I hit it so hard that I was actually knocked off my feet and landed (thankfully) on a small flat rock rather than the jagged ones surrounding it. I’m pretty sure I would have knocked myself out had I not had a helmet on. I really could have done with owning one of those helmets for our trips to the temples in Siem Reap. Oh well.

That afternoon, after showering and warming up a bit, we drove all the way to the Coromandel coast - a long way - and when we got there we searched for a DoC campsite which wasn’t signposted (and thus we couldn’t find it) and ended up paying $20 for a campsite in Coroglen - basically a field with some toilets. Not much for your money but without a toilet in Bertha, it was difficult to freedom camp.

Cate and Matt xx

---