rap, rock n' raft

We got an early start this morning to drive to the caving place at Waitomo. The group was pretty small – just four other people plus the guide. I’d been to Waitomo (“water holes” in Maori) in November, but just did a ‘dry’ option. Not so this time – first stop was at a shed to put on wetsuits, pants to protect the wetsuit, a climbing harness, and helmets with headlamps.

We drove on to the cave, piled out, and hiked down to it. The landscape around the caves is pretty amazing, lots of stacked rounded rocks that look almost like the ruins of old stone buildings, and large green depressions in the ground where more tomos might form many years down the road. Our guide, Stew, taught us rappelling (‘abseiling’ in NZ) techniques on land before we stepped off a ledge to rappel 27m into the mouth of the cave. Once in the cave, we walked around for a bit and saw the glowworms, eels and wetas. Wetas are basically crickets on steroids and can grow to be nearly a foot long if you include their legs in the measurement. They’re what the digital media studio that did the Lord of the Rings trilogy is named after, too. Once we’d done some walking and wading, we picked up inner tubes and floated down the fairly sedate underground river. There’s a drought at the moment, so there weren’t really any rapids, but if I get a chance to come back in the winter I can go again for free to experience the higher waters. We jumped off some rocks, squeezed through some very small holes, slid down muddy rockslides, and then went back to our starting point to rock climb the 27m we’d abseiled on the way down.

After a full day in the cave, some warm soup was in order back at the office, and then we went on our way driving up north-east in the direction of Hahei for diving tomorrow. Ann arranged a dive – I’m saving up for the Poor Knights Islands – and we picked up supplies for an oil change since all the mechanics around were booked solid for the holiday weekend and surrounding days, and we’ve got a lot of driving to do in the next couple days.

Our drive up to the Coromandel Forest was nice, with a stop in Hamilton to get food for the next couple of days, and we found our campsite at Wentworth, an old gold mining settlement, without any drama.