Day 39/72: Glow worms

We woke up early and drove for an hour to Waitomo- a tiny village which is famous for a huge labyrinth of caves underneath the hillside, absolutely full of glow worms. We had signed up to do 'black labyrinth', and as we got into our wetsuits and picked up a huge rubber ring, we learnt this was going to involve going through the cave in the rubber ring while looking at glow worms.

The caves involved a lot of scrambling to get into, and were incredibly dark in places. The water was freezing cold, and we both ended up shivering. The sections of the cave (once we had ducked under stalagtites and jumped backwards off waterfalls and paddled along freezing stretches of river) where we lay on our backs and formed a train and looked up at the glow worms shining above us were absolutely magical. About 5 minutes from the end they got everyone to turn off their helmet lights and we all played a game called 'guess the way out' - if you can't see the glow worms then you've gone wrong.

The experience left us slightly numb, in awe, and so ready for the soup and bagels at the end of the trip.

We drove on to our next stop: Rotorua. A supposedly beautiful huge lake, however it just has huge cities around it and we couldn't get close enough to the lake to see it properly. The campsite we were at felt like someone's back garden, however had hot pools heated from the ground underneath--rotorua seems to be a massive source of geothermal activity. We went for a walk and a quick run up in a forest of redwoods, which was lovely.Read more