Kiyomi and Ren's Excellent Adventures: Caving...

December 14 - Waitomo Caves

Few pictures today I'm afraid (although there are now almost 3000 of them, so I'm not sure it's a big tragedy). I forgot the camera and Kohji was spelunking through caves in a wetsuit, so no real room for one. I did grab a couple on the iphone, but they're pretty hazy.

We started the day under cloudy skies with occassional drizzles. I'm going to try to make the best of it, but I can see that 10 days of this will get to me after awhile. The drive out of Auckland was by far the busiest we've experienced. It's obvious that the North Island is more populated, and Auckland in particular fits the bill for any large, international city.

The scenery rolling along was not particularly noticeable, other than I did note it was a tad browner around here. We were, however, on a 4 lane expressway for the most part, so it's generally not conducive to looking around. I will say it was nice driving something other than the campervan - round-abouts are way easier. We're driving a Forester (the kids keep calling it the Nana-car because my mom had one) which I would said was a larger car prior to 3 weeks driving a campervan.

Our destination today was the Waitomo Caves - an area riddled with networks of limestone caves. We figured it would be not a bad place to spend a rainy day or two. Other than cave touring companies, there isn't much to the town of Waitomo Caves itself. It's obvious though that cave exploration for tourists is a pretty booming business around here as there are a number of companies offering tours in their own branches of the network. We're still staying in the camperparks, but without the camper. A lot of this places have small cabins as well, and so for the northern leg of the trip we decided to give them a whirl. So far, it's pretty much the same experience as the campervan with more maneouvrability and more luggage lugging.

We arrived in time for lunch at a little restaurant right beside the camp park. They had the best kids menu ever, including beans on toast and leg of lamb, which is what our kids wanted. Kiyomi has become a lover of lamb down here. Not sure if she's aware what exactly she's eating, but she gobbles it up.

After lunch, Kohji headed out for a 4 hour spelunking tour. I will allow him a guest spot on the blog to fill you in on that.

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How very generous of my wife. This is pretty much the first time that I've had a chance to touch the computer the whole trip! Well, not quite.

The caves were pretty darned amazing. I've always wanted to do some real caving and this was my chance to do it as it can only be done in a few places in the world. I went with a company called Waitomo Adventures (I wasn't going to do it on my own - too risky), and picked a tour called Haggis' Honking Holes (not sure why). After our group of six North Americans including a guy who works as an in-water surfing photographer (cool job), got fitted for our wetsuits and our rubber boots (I never imagined doing caving in rubber boots but they did an amazing job of gripping the wet limestone - apparently they were designed for meat cutters who are always on wet concrete floors), we took a quick rapping course and then we walked through a sheep field to a hidden hole in some bushes. A scramble into a narrow hole was followed by a rappel down through a waterfall tube (complete with waterfall!) and we were deep in the pitch-black cave.

We didn't know which way we were supposed to go at that point until we realized we had to go through the waterfall to a hole behind it. Along the way, we saw stalactites (the sticky-downy thingies) and stalagmites (the sticky-uppy thingies) as well as glow-worms up close, oyster fossils, really cool "blooming" stalactite formations, etc etc, all in a very natural state. Unlike the caves we had been able to see in Guangxi when we picked up Ren, where there were walkways, coloured lights lighting up the rooms etc, in this case it was just us walking, climbing, sliding, crawling, and squirming on our bellies like marines, through a narrow three-dimensional maze and just our headlamps for lights. There were a few rappels, a couple of rock-climbing sections, a few ladders over abysses and climbing up vertical holes, all over about 3 hours underground. The first 2/3 was wet work - no actual swimming but lots of crawling through water and waterfalls. Unfortunately, no cameras were allowed and I was too cheap to pay $25 for the pictures that the guides took, so no photographic record.

Definitely worthwhile, and a highlight.

Now back to your regularly scheduled program.

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The kids and I napped, did homework and headed out for our own little cave exploration adventure on the Ruakuri Bushwalk. The short 30 minute hike was about a 5-10 minute drive from the park and turned out to be awesome. A looped track that takes you through a dense forest canopy peppered with limestone rock faces. Walkways and stairs lead up along the rock faces in some sections and take you past and through small caves. The kids had a great time playing in the caves pretending to be bats. They even wanted to investigate a large one, but I convinced them it wasn't the best of ideas without flashlights (despite the perfectly good set of stairs leading into a pitch black oblivion). There were stalagmites, stalagtites, rushing streams bubbling into what appeared to be bottomless caverns. All perfectly suitable and viewable by a 3 and 6 year old.

After our own little version of spelunking, we picked up the kids and I picked up groceries and made dinner in the camp kitchen. This one was a tad busier than some of the others we've used on this trip, but as usual it worked out well to not have to look for or endure (if the kids are cantakerous) a restaurant. On the whole, I'm finding the kids can handle one meal a day at a restautant, otherwise, they are too impatient to wait for the food, wait for us to finish.

Things to note: I am finding that the night sky (when it's not obscured by clouds of course) is way different. Not being an astronomy buff, I couldn't point out what's different, but it is very obvious the stars are different here.