Day 40

Wednesday 28^th February

After waking up around 0930, I wondered inside the Main building to see if there was any yet at the office to pay, to no joy, it wasn’t until around 1030 after we had showered and were about to start making breakfast I actually found anyone. I paid up for last night and for tonight and also paid in advance to use the washing machine with the first HOT wash since we have been on the road and tumble dryer. Having loaded the washing machine with the whites we had breakfast and killed time by watching TV. We had to be at the Long Black café at about 1250 to start our 5 hour black Abyss tour of the Waitomo caves with “the legendary black water rafting company” , and as the café was literally 100m down the road from where we were we were I no major rush.- neither does it seem was the washing machine which eventually finished its load at 1245, we stuffed it all in a pillow case and headed down to the café where we were met by our guides ‘Snappy’ nicknamed for the Snap link Carabineer she wore in her ear and Carl, so called because his parents liked the name.

“Er hello, my er, my er rings leaking”

We went down the steps behind the café and were given a weird dungaree style wet suit that from the back came over your head and fastened by Velcro to the front, a wetsuit jacket to go over the top, wet suit cocks, Wellington boots (Caz was chuffed for some reason as they had Angus 3000 written on them and no one else’s did) climbing harness with a Broken rack (never seen one before used instead of fig of eight for abseiling) and finally a helmet with a torch- we looked ….. Dumb.

We were driven for 20 mins to the start point a 35m abseil down into a cave system. After some quick training we managed to get all 8 and the two guides down the holes in a record breaking 40mins!!! Some people obviously don’t like fast descents.

At the bottom we did a quick introduction to each other before caving for about 200m and then doing the Flying Fox, an underground pitch black zip line which descends 10m over about 50m so it’s pretty steep.

We stopped where we were an had a coffee and a flapjack, as we sat there we all turned our head torched off and looked up there were literally Thousands of glow worms above us, it looked like the night sky, only with slightly green stars, it was pretty cool. After that we jumped of the edge of a cliff? For want of a better word into an underground stream, holding the rubber rings under our asses as we jumped and landing on them, it was a good 15 -20ft drop and the ice cold water shooting up your bum, was a bit of a shock, we pulled and paddled ourselves across the rock face for a few hundred and then stopped for a talk about the caves and glow worms themselves. I’m not doing a word for word, but the summary was excellent

“So in summary, what you’re looking at are Cannibalistic Maggots, dripping in snot burning their own shit”

Not really a line for the brochure, but pretty cool all the same.

We then all linked up putting our legs under the arms of the person in front of you and were pulled in the pitch black through the caves, if we saw thousands of Glow worms in the first cave, there were billions in this one and as they rock formations are at all different heights, it gave an awesome 3D light show- the feeling of being weightless floating on the ring in the water, going through that cave, is the closest I will probably ever get to being in space.- it was really peaceful until you heard a

Riiiiiip,

Pssssssssssst

“Er hello, my er, my er rings leaking”

We all laughed, the Oxford University lecturer originally from NZ had some how popped the tractor inner tube we were using as floatation devices and ended up walking the last part of the journey.

We turned our lights on once again and set off on foot leaving the rings where we had stopped, for 2 hours of caving scrambling and squeezing through some rather tight gaps, Culminating in Climbing up and around three small but fast flowing underground waterfalls, the last one leading us out into the open, Back in the van we headed back to the Café for a shower, Soup and Bagel.

It was, not really what I was expecting , in fact it wasn’t really what anyone in the group expected, advertised as Black water rafting, we hadn’t bothered white water rafting because of it, but the only fast flowing water we saw was the waterfalls, and then we didn’t really raft them.

We saw a comment book for guys who had done a slightly cheaper version of our trip therefore didn’t abseil, do the flying fox or climb the waterfalls- the comments they wrote were along the lines of

“F*cking waste of money, really Sh*t, F*ck you all”

That sort of convinced us we had picked the best trip, but it was not worth the money we paid - $195 each, we declined the Photo disc at $30 and headed back to the Van to go into town to get some supplies.

We walked with another couple who were on a round the world trip and had started before us in Argentina, as we chatted we got back to our van and gave them a lift into town, to the hostel they were staying at, we bought the necessaries, but another load of washing on, ate dinner, watched Hannibal and eventually went to bed.