Thursday February 6, 2014

Michael (the German cyclist) offered us his telephone so that we could call Intercity and find out what is happening with my pannier.  It was put on the Waitomo Caves bus and I was able to pick it up here.  It felt awful to think that I had almost lost all my clothes, I will definitely have to be more careful for the rest of this trip.  The ride would have been over for now, I would have had to replace everything and we would have had to go back to Auckland to buy new stuff, an expense we didn’t need.  19 hours of panic over.

After we had picked up the bag from the bus we were walking down the hill back to the campsite and met a couple from Detroit, Michigan.  They were visiting New Zealand as part of their 40^th wedding anniversary celebrations.  This is a small world.  Jim mentioned that his longest bike ride was cycling from north of Detroit to Ohio, cycling GOBA and then cycling back to Detroit approximately 806 miles (approx. 1,300 kms).

We had previously met Jim in a little museum on GOBA in 2012, and chatted to him about his trip to GOBA.  It’s a small world after all.

After we had picked up the pannier we carried on with our plans for the day and booked our Blackwater Rafting adventure – we had a couple of hours to spare and took advantage to relax a little.

What is blackwater rafting?  It basically means that you are rafting in a cave.  In this instance it is ‘rafting’ on individual inner tubes in caves and as we came to an underground waterfall, we had to jump from it, into the pool below – in the dark, a little scary.

\”This is the original Waitomo subterranean adventure that will have you climbing, black water tubing, leaping and floating through Ruakuri Cave\”.

The Blackwater Rafting was awesome, the two guides Miko and Nicki were really good and a lot of fun.  We all got kitted out in wetsuits, boots and helmets, then we were driven to Ruanaki cave.  First we had to practice jumping into the water backwards with an inner tube around your bum. Once we got into the cave we floated along for a while looking at the glow worms.  When we stopped, Miko gave us some information on what glow-worms actually are – they are the larvae or maggots of this particular insect that only lives for 4 days to reproduce and do it all over again.  Her comment was that if they had called it the maggot caves it may not have been as successful as the glow-worm caves.

We walked through another cave and saw a fossil of a whale and then jumped from our first underground waterfall, it was about 2 feet high.  The next waterfall was about 3 feet high and the last one was about 6 feet high.  It was quite scary but when I successfully jumped from the 6 feet one it was awesome. The last thing we had to do was turn our lights of and follow the glow worm lights to the exit of the cave, floating on our inner-tubes.  Now that was scary.  At one point I couldn’t hear anyone around me and the water was pushing me against the rocks.  I looked up and the glow worms were to the right of me, I paddled towards them and kept saying to myself follow the lights, go towards the lights!! From being 3^rd in the group I had moved up to first and was the first one Miko greeted at the end.  Ralf had drifted to the back.

When we got back to the Blackwater Adventure building we were given hot soup and a bagel.  We could buy photos that had been taken throughout the trip, but they weren’t very good.

We were taken back to our campsite and then met Jim and Irene for a drink before going to bed at about 10:30.  A good day.