After spending a few days in New Zealand absolutely shattered, experiencing the Skytower (not for those with vertiginous issues), we picked up a campervan and headed to Waitomo on the west of the North Island.
Waitomo is the place to go caving. A suitably placed campsite was found and so we picked the type of caving we wanted to do.
The Lost World
We arranged a caving trip with a local company that takes you to the Lost World. The Lost World is an underground hole and a series of caves discovered by a group of men undertaking a railway survey back in the early 1900's. They named it the Lost World because that's exactly what it looks like. It's sort of a cross between Jurassic Park and The Descent.
We abseiled into the 100m deep hole, incredibly difficult to do for someone like me who suffers from vertigo but once the abseil began I was fine. In fact, it was great. I loved every second of it.
Once we got to the bottom of the hole we embarked on our expedition into the caves. This involved climbing through tight squeezes created by fallen rocks, navigating up a very fast flowing stream, swimming through large, deep pools, grabbing onto sharp rocks to pull you against the current, dodging spiders (admittedly they were small but vile all the same), clambering from one side of the cave to the other using whatever means possible to avoid dropping into the water, sitting under waterfalls and climbing ladders to get you to higher levels of the caves. All of this was done wearing a wetsuit and a pair of white gum boots that filled with water. The entire outfit, after 4 hours of such activity, was incredibly heavy.
We saw amazing rock formations and glowworms, which are beautiful but when I learnt more about them made my skin crawl. I'm not great with insects.
As you can imagine we were physically exhausted by the end of it. It took 5 hours to go 1.8km through the caves. My imagination had gone into overdrive by this point and in my head I was referencing the film The Descent. I decided that should I ever get caught in a series of caves where I was trying to outrun a bone crunching monster I would, in the end, give in. It would be too tiring to fight against such a thing. 4 hours of fight is about all I could muster.
Anyway, we left Waitomo and we are now in Napier.....wine tasting country!
We hired a tandem, yes a tandem, today and cycled around a few vineyards, a chocolate factory and a beer and cider makers sampling the local offerings. By the end of it we were a bit squiffy and had acquired 4 good bottles of wine and a few chocolates to keep us going on the rest of our adventure around New Zealand.
Tomorrow......on to Wellington.
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2 comments:
Wow, caving! I would never be able to deal with being underground so much, hats off to you both. The tandem sounds brilliant, did you sing as well? So glad you're having such an ace time, (we had to weight the kids down with bricks today, wind so bloody strong). Carla xx
I forgot to say that Bryan and I are sharing your experiences as much as we can by copying what you're doing. So far we have sat in the greenhouse for three days solid eating vast quantities of haggis and drinking whisky, (mauritius), and last night I wrapped Bryan in clingfilm and put him in a cold bath in the dark, with a torch and a copy of National Geographic to look at, (caving). I'm trying to persuade him to cook chips in the back of the car while I drive around so we can pretend we're in a campavan. Bring it on! Cx
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