Waitomo Caves

Going to the Waitomo Caves was probably one of the coolest things we've ever done. We started by meeting our guide at a farm house and he drove us to a little hut where we dressed up in our wetsuits, pants, rubber boots, harnesses, and helmets. We then drove to a farmers field of sheep and practiced strapping ourselves into the ropes to abseil (sp?) 80 ft down into the dark caves. The sheep and newly born lambs kept coming up to us and jumping around.

Then we did the real thing... we went one at a time down the 80ft drop and waited for the others. There were 6 people in our group. We hiked through the river with our head lights on, crawled through small holes. We finally turned our lights off and saw millions of glow worms, which are actually maggots. On our way back we got to use inner tubes to go down the river... it was awesome!!!! we turned our headlights off so we were completely in the dark. Our guide took all the pics.

The whole trip lasted about 5 hours, we were only underground for 2. When we were done we went back to the hut to take our stuff off and take a hot shower since the river water was sooooooooooooo cold. We went back to the farm house and a nice cup of soup was waiting for us.







Practicing on land before going down 80 ft into the caves. Notice the lambs in the background.







Cam about to go into the darkness.

I was next!


After a bunch of hiking we got to go down the river in innertubes.

Cam and Rob squeeze through a small hole to get to the other side... neither of them were able to get out without falling in the river.






Then we went down without innertubes.

More climbing.

More holes to crawl through.


The glow worms!

The hole we came down and climbed up.

I had no idea until the end of the trip that these were in the river!!! I'm actually happy I didn't know.