Checked out and ready to go. Wai-o-Tapu Thermal Wonderland! Opening at 830 we arrived around 9 and started through the park.
25 markers in total, each one had something special about them. Mud boiling, different minerals coming through the steam creating different colours, steam geysers, and the stench of sulphur. But all in all it was pretty cool. The last stop was called the Devil’s Bath which was a pool of green water 😀
Our tour at the Waitomo Caves was at 1230 and Waitomo being about 2 hours away, we couldn’t stay to see the Geyser at Wai-o-tapu go at 1015… After 2 hours of driving we barely just made it to the 1230 tour, with only 5-10 minutes to spare with just enough time to grab something to eat.
Our first cave was the Ruakiri Cave, or The Den of the Dogs. Named after the animals that the Maori people found there. The cave consisted of millions of limestone formations. Like coral, they took years to form. Approximately 1cm of limestone could take around 100 years. There was a sign outside giving the fine of 10,000$ if any of the formations were damaged. Our guide, Lucas, also explained the glowworms and showed them to us as well. They are actually the larvae or maggot stage of a fly. They are light-brownish in colour and are about 1 to 2cm in length. Their glow comes from mixing an enzyme with their… excretion. Their stages are the egg, larvae, pupa, fly. The fly only lives for about a week and reproduces hundreds of eggs in that time. The glowworms or glowmaggots, catch their food by dropping down up to 20 lines of web, much like the spider. They catch insects and consume their.. Moisture. The most impressive part of this cave is that it is completely wheelchair accessible!
Our next stop, Aranui Caves. After briefly walking the Ruakiri Bushwalk in the rain, we met up with our next tour guide, Christian, with just the two of us, we took our tour through the smaller cave. This cave was discovered later than the other two by a farmer who was chasing a wild pig that ended up in that undiscovered cave. Unlike the other two caves, this one did not have glowworms due to the fact that there was no river running through it. At the end of the cave they have thought there to be an earthquake that collapsed the tunnel, closing off the rest of the cave as well as a water source that helped form them. Maybe.
And finally our last stop of this trip, the glowworm cave, Waitomo Caves. Having some time to spare, we chatted with the other visitors, 3 of which had came from England and had visited the caves in the 70s or 80s, pretty cool :P. The other visitor was from Saskatoon. It seems most people only know of a couple places like Toronto or Vancouver. When saying from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, she could usually sum it up with the Prairies in Canada. Cough. Heh… They were a fun bunch. In the cave we weren’t allowed photography so we left our cameras behind. Our guide showed us some of the limestone formations as well as the threads of the glowworms and the maggot itself. A couple of the limestone formations were nicknamed. One was a kiwi doing a bungy jump, an Arab riding a Camel, and a mother with two children. Yup.
After this part of the cave we went lower to the river, where they have 4 boats setup and they bring the visitors into the underwater caverns in which the cave was first discovered. There were thousands of glowworms lighting up the cave ceiling like a night sky. Amazing sight.
Aaaaand. 2ish hours back to Auckland International Airport to waste or time till check-in and boarding at 7am. Going home!
Wai-o-Tapu – Devil’s Bath
Waitomo Caves – Ruakiri
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