From the Mountains to the Sky Act 15: Spelunking

This past weekend, I went on a trip with 'M' to the North Island. We took Thursday and Friday off of work and went on a 4 day trip from Auckland south through the central region of the North Island.

We left Christchurch Wednesday evening, traveling by a combination of bus & taxi to the airport (nearly missing the flight), and arriving in Auckland around 8:30pm. We picked up our rental car and were off South towards our first destination, Waikato. Arriving at the hostel at 11:45pm, we discovered that while the door to the hostel (Juno Hall Backpackers) was open, as promised, there were no keys for any rooms left out for us. We had no idea where we were supposed to sleep, or how we could possibly find out. We wandered through the hostel trying doors hoping to find a room with beds that looked like they were supposed to be for us. In the end, we ended up just picking a random room and falling asleep, hoping to sort things out in the morning. It wasn't our room, but the manager was quite understanding as they had forgotten to leave our keys out.

Thursday, our only activity for the day was the Black Abyss tour of the Waikato caves, run by the Legendary Black Water Rafting Co. This was my highlight of the entire trip. The experience was completely novel and I really enjoyed it. I've never before been deep inside a cave and it was incredible. Our tour guides (Doug and Jah) were friendly, helpful, and tons of fun. The tour had 6 people on it, 'M' and I along with two absolutely huge 20-something males, an old Kiwi man, and a tourist from England.

The tour begins with an abseiling lesson. For those who don't know, abseiling is the art of lowering oneself on a rope either down a cliff or into a cave. You control your speed by changing the angle of a rope passing through a rack of metal tines as well as by the tightness of your grip on the rope. The lesson lasted about 20 minutes before we were all set to try out our new-found skills by lowering ourselves 30m into the cave. The abseil lasts 2-5 minutes and you have to negotiate a narrow opening on the way down. This was the first of many occasions I was very glad to be wearing my helmet on the expedition.

Reaching the bottom, we went for a short walk through some damp, but mostly dry, tunnels: looking at a variety of rock formations and using our spelunking helmets to look around. It was great fun. Following this wander, there was a short trip down a zip line into a pitch dark cavern lit only by the steady but minuscule glow of hundreds of glowworms. We stopped for a quick glass of hot chocolate and a small snack before the tour continued. While eating this snack, the guides had us sit on the edge of a ledge with our feet dangling. It was very difficult to tell what was at the bottom of the small cliff. It was quite unnerving.

From here, we grabbed some innertubes and leaped off the cliff into a stream that runs through the caves. The water was very cold, hence the wet-suits you've seen in the pictures so far. We floated along the stream, stopping to take a good look at the glow worms on the ceiling and examine the rocks along the way. Glowworms are actually not worms, but maggots, the larva of flies. They live in damp places and catch prey by dangling spiderweb-like threads down and lighting up their behinds to attract small animals. After pupation, they live for only a short time before perishing (they have no stomachs in this form). On the ceiling of a dark cave, they look a bit like the night sky, little pricks of starlight shining through. Quite a sight to see. We floated back up the stream to where we had been before, left our innertubes for the next group and started walking (through the stream).

After a while, our walk became not so much a walk, but a swim/crawl/shimmy through some deep water, small gaps, and narrow spaces. For a while, I was at the front of the group. It felt a bit like I was leading a spelunking expedition, wandering through caves looking for the way out.

Next, we ended up at the top of a small waterfall. We were given the opportunity to jump off this waterfall and this was very enjoyable. Landing in a deep pool beyond the falls before clambering back up the way we had came. There was also a way to crawl beneath the falls and emerge on the other side. I tried a few times to do this, but was always caught by the falls along the way and swept off down into the pool below.

Our trip concluded with a climb up the "Twin Waterfalls of Doom." This name was perhaps a little melodramatic but, at first glance, the waterfalls were quite intimidating to climb. Fortunately we had the help of our trusty guides and everyone was able to clamber out without too much trouble. I emerged onto the dry surface, wet, weary, a little cold, but deeply satisfied with experiencing something very new that I had not seen before and probably won't see again.

Following the tour, we were given hot showers, bagels, and soup. A very welcome luxury.
Around 4pm, we left Waitomo and drove to Taupo, the next stop on the north Island adventure.

[These pictures are a little blurry. My apologies. But as an excuse, they were taken underground in very dark conditions.]