Waitomo and the caves

April 7, 2010


We awoke to better weather, grey, dry but cold and headed North West to Waitomo. Waitomo in Maori means ‘water entering a hole in the ground’. This area of New Zealand is made up of heavily weathered limestone – Karst topography which means caves! Caves were known in the area by the Maori however the Europeans discovered their tourism potential in the late 1800’s and to date there are about 120 caves known in this area. You can take a cave tour, underground raft (wish we had done this), rappel and climb in the caves and do a glow worm tour. We did two tours, the first into the smaller glow worm cave and the second into one of the largest caves – Ruakuri.

The glow worm tour takes about 45 minutes into a short beautiful cave, however the real draw is the last part of the tour where the glow worms live. Glow worms are not really worms but fly larvae or maggots. They spend about 9 months in their larval stage which is when they grow and glow. They then pupate, come out as a fly, mate and die. They have chemicals they mix in their feces so their rears glow to attract the insects they eat. So while they sound cute they really are carnivorous, cannibalistic maggots that have glowing butts, eat bugs for most of their lives then spend their last hours on earth shagging themselves to death – but this description doesn’t sell. They like moist dark areas where there are plenty of insects (a cave is perfect) and they cover the cave ceiling and hang down sticky threads to capture their meals. We boarded a flat bottom boat and in the pitch black you float down the cavern. There are literally hundreds of thousands of tiny green points of lights overhead - it looks like the night sky!

The second cave about 4 kilometers away was simply amazing it is called Ruakari which means ‘two dogs’ as two wild dogs used to live in the cave entrance and were killed by a Maori hunter. The cave mouth was later used for a burial chamber for important tribe members. It is now sealed and protected, 11 bodies are thought to be buried there. They have cut a huge vertical shaft down to the cave which is lined with a spiral ramp for entry – approximately 8 stories high. This cave has about 1.6 km of accessible tunnel however there is still an arm unexplored. Sometimes the cave is less than a meter wide and I had to duck in several places to get under stalactites. Other areas are as large as a school yard and sometimes many stories high. The cave is covered in sheet flow, stalactites, stalagmites, columns and drapes and is simply marvellous. The guide has a caver’s lamp and highlights features of the cave. It is also cleverly lit and the lighting goes on and off as you go through the cave. The lower levels of the cave contain a swiftly flowing river and this is where you can black water raft. In the deeper and damper portions of the cave the roof is covered with glow worms. We spent about two hours in this cave and couldn’t get enough. I wish we could have done the black water rafting.

We headed back to camp to clean up and decided to try the local café/restaurant called HuHu for supper. While Waitomo is not large (perhaps a few hundred permanent residents) and the caves are the only draw, our campground was packed and as it turned out we had to wait over an hour just to get a seating and another hour to get fed, but was it ever worth it! This was simply the best meal we had in New Zealand – goat cheese and onion tart, seared venison loin, slow roasted duck and deserts to die for. We closed the place down and hit the sack. It is cold tonight perhaps 10 degrees but clear and the stars are magnificent. Tomorrow it is off to the Coromandel Peninsula for our last two nights camping.