Waitomo

1/12/2007

Our accommodation in Waitomo is pretty sweet as. "Sweet as" is a phrase that the Kiwis (New Zealanders) say a lot to describe things as "cool." It took me a while to actually figure out the phrase, since the way some people say it makes it sound like an odd thing to say for certain situations (if you haven't gotten it by now, add the letter 's' to the end of one of the words). The place we stayed has extremely unique rooms, including a train, a plane, 2 hobbit houses, and one boat (under construction) converted into hotel rooms. The girls stayed in the train, and the guys got to live it up in one of the hobbit houses. Fortunately for Adam and Philip, who are 6'5" plus, the houses were built for humans rather than Bagginses. It was pretty sweet as.


After breakfast we went to a place to go blackwater rafting, which basically involves rafting on a river through a cave (hence the 'black' water). After getting us set up with wet suits and helmets, our guides named Troy and Snappy (she certainly had a pretty snappy attitude) took us to get inner tubes at the caves. See below for a goofy picture of us. The caves were really cool. We walked through some parts, but we were able to sit on the inner tubes for a lot of it as well. We used headlamps to see; however, when we turned all the lamps (called "torches" over here) off, the caves looked like the night sky with little bright lights. These were the glowworms on the cave walls, at least that is the marketable and selling name applied to them. They were actually fly larvae, not worms at all. Snappy poetically described them as "maggots with shiny sh*$" because it is actually their waste materials that is actually emitting light (the light is supposed to attract food sources).

After the blackwater rafting, we went back to our accommodation to see a farm show that basically demonstrated how farming was done back in the old days in NZ. It was a very cool one-man show. With participants from the crowd, the guy showed how to saw a tree trunk with an old cross-saw, how to cut down a tree after climbing it using boards jammed into the tree, and a bunch of animal demonstrations, including a black pig doing tricks, a small white horse, a dog herding some sheep, a massive stear, and a sheep shearing. He apparently has a world record in the number of sheep sheared in one day. He just manhandled that sheep. The show was very well done and quite funny. Here are some pictures.

After the show we drove over to the caves where we were earlier. Instead of going in the caves again, we explored the area around them above ground. We were going to go abseiling (kiwi term for rappelling), but Adam's gear had been locked away in an office, which was unfortunate. Nevertheless, the caves were still fun to explore. Here are a few pics.