Starry night sky

One of the more popular activities on the north island is called black water rafting. It's quite simple really. There are these caves in Waitomo with water running through them, so they plop you in an inner tube and float you through them and thus black water rafting was created.

There are 2 different trips you can do, one that only does the rafting bit, the other is bit longer and more adventurous. I choose the latter. It starts off with a 120 foot abseil down a tomo (tunnel) to get into the cave. The abseil (the way you go down a vertical wall attached to a rope) was through an extremely narrow opening that opened up after the first 30 feet of squeezing your way through. Once we all got down into the pitch black cave we turned our headlamps on and started off on our neck adventure, a long zip-line dropping further into the cave.

Side note. I mentioned this in an earlier post, but one of the reasons that the caves of Waitomo are famous are for the glowworms that are there. Glowworms are worms whose butt glows to attract flies that they then eat. They glow a neon blue/green color and the first ones I saw in Franz Josef weren't that impressive, in fact I thought they were stupid. This trip changed my mind.

You were attached to the zip-line and swung out over the cave opening, how deep? who knows. The guide shuts off his lamp, the only one so that you are now in the pitch black and releases you. You accelerate around a corner in the cave into a rather large opening and the ceiling is littered with thousands of glowworms. It is almost like you are zipping through a neon light show because there are so many. By the time you feel like you might be getting out of control you hit the end of the line thus finishing your zip-line. After the all the tough work it was time for tea and biscuits atop a ledge about 20 feet above some water below.

Once the guide thought the tea and cookies were done he took the lead and much to our surprised jumped off the ledge with a inner tube around him and smacked down in the river below. We really weren't sure how deep or cold it was at this point but we were soon instructed to follow. You had to jump so that the inner tube went around your butt and you landed on the water flat and made a heck of a loud noise with the inner tube smacking the water. About half the group flipped out of their tube upon landing which was hilarious, but even funnier was everyones reaction to the ice cold water. A chilly 55 degrees (we did have wet suits though).

From there you head upstream first by pulling yourself along a rope. Once at the end the guide tells you all about the glowworms but now its time to see them, apparently the thousand or so above the zip-line weren't enough. So we latched together and headed back down the river as a long chain, this time with our lights off and we were given the most beautiful "nights" sky that I had ever seen. There were glowworms everywhere that lit up the ceiling of the cave perfectly. I was expecting to see shooting stars or something like that but the guides were just playing games and messing with us the entire time as we enjoyed the amazing views.

We kept going passed the ledge we jumped off at and started bobbing through some small rapids, at the end of which we ditched the tubes and started walking a bit further down the cave. The currents picked up at one point and instead of walking we all started floating down (wet suits are very buoyant). Glow worms above, mysterious cave walls popping out all the time, and freezing cold water below made for an amazing journey.

Then we got to the really adventurous part. We turned off from the main pathway to a small side tunnel that kept getting smaller and smaller. At times the water was so high that the cave ceiling was literally 3 inches from the water surface and you had to be pushed through lying on your back. For a solid 15 minutes you were neck deep in water with the cave wall sitting right on your head. If you were scared of small spaces you would have been terrified through these sections. I kept thinking it would take much for this to flood and us to drown but I had faith in the guides. The river below was much rougher than before and the current was extremely strong. We continued to follow through these miniature caves and came to a series of 3 waterfalls. You could only see one at a time. The waterfalls were rough. They weren't too high, but the amount of water running over their crests was impressive and we were climbing up them. It was extremely tough going battling the currents coming down but once we were down we had climbed out of the cave and the journey was over. As we found out later, all of the rain they have been having in the last week has raised water levels to the highest that the company will run tours at, and they weren't suppose to go up the waterfalls because the flows were too strong. Fortunately the guides didn't follow all the rules and let us do it anyway.

This was hands down the best activity I have down in New Zealand, simply out of this world.