Waitomo

Waitomo is famous for its caves which people flock from all around to see the glowworms. There are a variety of ways that you can visit the caves but we opted to explore the caves on rubber rings. We arrived at The Legendary Black Water Rafting Co. nice and early, ready for our caving adventure to find out that the cave was flooded so we wouldn't be able to go today!

There isn't a lot else to do in Waitomo apart from caving so we went for a scenic drive to see a natural bridge, a small cave and a waterfall. The Mangapōhue natural bridge is formed from the remains of an ancient cave. Despite the rain, it looked incredible. Our next stop was the Piripiri cave. We had to take a torch as it was pitch black but there were some pretty impressive rock formations inside. Our last stop was Marokopa Falls, a 43m waterfall. One good thing that came from all the rain was the serious amount of water that was crashing down it! We got a quick picture and then headed back to the van as we were getting pretty wet!

To keep the twitcher happy we visited Otorohanga Kiwi House and Native Bird Park. Here we got to see some Kiwi's which was pretty cool. They are very funny creatures as they look more like a mammal than a bird and have really tiny wings that you can't see so they walk around a little bit like a dinosaur searching for insects. They are super cute though. They also had a variety of other birds for Simon to get excited about, including mountain parrots, parakeets and falcons. They also had a couple of rare tuatara which are an iguana type reptile.

Tomorrow we are heading to the shire, to the real life Hobbiton movie set so we picked a free spot to camp near there so we wouldn't have to drive very far in the morning.Read more