Waipu Caves

We arrived at Waipu around 22:30 and the weather was pretty crappy. I was tired, and not keen on an outdoor adventure with no access to a building or shower. But, the fear of missing out on the glow worms motivated me, as well as the fact I could change my mind if things declined weather wise. We maneuvered inside the car to get into backpacks and changed into shorts so that clothes wouldn't get wet when submerged in the cave. I also put my sandals on rather than get soaking boots.

Once we were dressed, we walked about 50 meters to the cave entrance. Once we walked into the cave, wind and rain were no longer a factor which was a plus. However, the cave floor was a shallow pool of water that got deeper and shallower at different points in the cave.

Immediately upon entering the cave, we saw the glow worms. There was a huge cluster of them in an oval shape on the ceiling of the cave. There were smaller patches of glow worms in the first cave, but that big group was the main event. We decided to go further into the cave and as we walked through the cold water, which got past my knees at one point, I had a spark of fear hoping that water levels wouldn't rise any higher. Luckily they didn't and that was the highest we had the water. It normally stayed just above ankle height.

The cave ceiling got lower on our right hand side as we traveled into the next section, but opened up high on the left. This section has an incredible amount of glow worms everywhere. They were close to head height on lower areas, but high up like stars in the higher areas. It was almost like standing in the middle of the sky with twinkling stars all around. It was pretty spectacular and a moment I'll surely never forget. Because there were so many here, we just stayed and took it all in.

We had been standing in the cold water this whole time, which was starting to make me feel cold. Unfortunately we took this as a sign to go, but we had been in the cave over an hour at this point. We made our way back to the entrance, stopping at the large group of worms before heading out of the cave.

We weren't dirty (I wasn't because my sandals were pretty handy, Allan was a tiny bit from the walk out of the cave) so it was more a case of drying off and then setting up our sleeping bags to sleep in the car. It was about 00:30 by the time we went to bed, but it was worth it.

(Turn up brightness for better potential to see the worms in the pictures)Read more