Waitomo Caves!

I forgot to write about the caves!! Geez!! I've done so much it's been nuts. On the way from Raglan to Maketu we stopped in Waitomo which is famous for it's caves. You can do something called black water rafting, but I just did a cheaper cave tour. We went thru one cave on a boat and looked at glowworms... awesome creatures that apparently are only in New Zealand and Australia, or these kind are anyway. We each got a helmet with a light on it and when we went into the cave we could only see a few of them. Then we turned off our lights and got in this raft and he took us down the river in the cave a ways till we got to this waterfall. We didn't go down the waterfall thank god. But by the time we got back up to where we started we could see thousands of glowworms on the ceiling and walls of the cave. It was so cool!!! Like looking at stars very far away. No pictures because it was dark, but they are supposed to send us some eventually.

The glowworms are awesome tho. They send down this little beaded, sticky string with a light on it. Bugs are attracted to the light and get caught on the string. Once they catch one I think they eat it and then they wrap themselves up in a cocoon and hatch later as a weird type of fly. And then I think they get eaten by other glowworms. Slightly cannibalistic, but really pretty. :-)

We went in another cave too, which was just a walking tour. There was once a river in that one as well (it's how the caves were formed: water eroding the limestone), but it hasn't run thru it for thousands of years. But there were awesome stalactites and stalagmites to see and a twenty thousand year old skeleton of the now extinct bird that preceded the kiwi!! Got some good pictures there (like the one at the top of this post.)

Sorry I forgot to insert this into my blog before!! Was just looking thru my pictures and remembered!! I'll try to get some of those up here. :-)

Love, Laura