We visited Waitomo caves with a local tour guide, who was either a very good actor or actually the nicest person I've ever met. After we told our group that we were on our honeymoon, he spent the rest of the trip trying to create "romantic" situations for us. As in, he would stand right behind us and say, "now, seems like an excellent time to kiss." Pretty funny. I told him about my caving adventures in Logan and some of the climbing I'd done. He thought it was pretty funny that the best way to find caving systems, is to make friends with geology professors. The caving in New Zealand, outside of the tours like we went on is very secretive too, since they have a similar problem that we do in the states: some guy dies, cave gets closed. Bummer.
Anyway, back to New Zealand. This tour was my favorite part of the trip--oddly enough, there are no real pictures of it. We had a few chances to take pictures at the mouth of the cave, but I have no real camera skills and I definetly didn't have a tripod, so I got a lot of grayish pictures.
When we entered the cave, we needed headlamps and a big lantern, but after spending about an hour inside, we walked out with out lights. As our eyes adjusted, we started seeing all the glow worms (real name? glow maggots--but that doesn't sound great on posters). It was so pretty. We floated through a tunnel on a raft, surrounded by glowing things--pretty cool.
Oh yeah, when we left the cave we were still in New Zealand. Win.
Lesser cave with some lights.
Here are some pictures that the tour company sent us after our visit. It's like they
knew I wasn't a skilled photographer.
Here are the strings of glowing secretions. Gross and beautiful.
Here's my picture:
(told ya: not an expert)
Raft heading down the tunnel, we were in complete darkness at this point. It was like flying through stars.
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