Thursday 22 October: Glowworm Caves
The Waitomo Glowworm caves (accessible by guided tour) are probably the most famous, and arguably the best, in New Zealand. However we have read bad reviews about the cattle-market nature of the tours and lack of care given by the guides. We therefore chose to book with a smaller company to see a different cave in the same area: Spellbound Gloworm Tours
We were not disappointed. The 3 hour tour included a guided commentary of 2 very impressive caves. One of them included an underground boat trip looking at a ceiling covered with glowworms (impossible to photograph!)
This is the Karst ladscape in which the caves are formed:
You can often tell from the surface there are cavesd below by the way yhe valley floor has big holes in it!
These are not the glowworms. These are the sticky threads that they put out (like fishing lines) to catch flies and small insects.
Here is my attempt at getting a picture of glowworms - no I can't see anything either!
But if you really want an idea of what a cave full of glowworms looks like then here is a picture of the end of the Spellbound cave provided by the company themselves:
This is a Cave Weta. The Weta is every New Zealand childs nightmare beasty - though pretty harmless they can get stuck in your hair. Yuck. The Weta are endemic to New Zealand and are very old. You can read more about them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weta
After the tour we stayed in the area to do the short but fascinating Ruakuri bush walk. This was just magical with a winding river, equally winding pathways, gullies, gorges, caves, tunnels .... and so on!
We changed our plans in the afternoon since the weather was so bad. We had planned to return a little further south to climb Mount Ngarauhoe (whic is Mount Doom in LOTR), but it was raining so much we decided to abandon that idea and head North (basicallt gaining a day on our itinerary) to find the Waikite Valley campsite which has some lovely thermal pools - a much better idea for a wet afternoon than climbing a mountain!
Golden Nugget: