I sat in the car for a moment, reacquainting myself with the arrangement of the dash and gearshift of a right-driver's-side car and pulled out onto the highway. One road would take me all the way to Waitomo, providing plenty of time in which to simply reacclimate to driving on the left side of the road.
Three hours later, I turned off onto the street where I would find the office of Waitomo Cave Black Water Rafting Company. Unfortunately, the bizarre Kiwi tendency to sometimes put signs after a turn off rather than before caused me to miss the driveway and pull into the next. Realizing my error and attempting to remedy it, I went to pull back onto the main road and, in doing so, made my first and one of the last driving mistakes: I looked left to check for oncoming traffic rather than right. I missed colliding with another vehicle by mere inches and sat in the car for a moment calming my nerves.
I had smooth sailing from there on. I checked in, signed the waiver indemnifying the operator from pretty much any responsibility, and piled into the van with the rest of my group, whose names I sadly no longer remember. I do know they included a very young couple from Wales, a 19 year-old with triple citizenship from the US, the UK, and NZ, and a pair of American girls.
We drove 20 minutes to their base, where we donned a wetsuit over our swimmers (to use the Kiwi/Aussie parlance), and a wet jacket, boots, and a pair of ridiculous pink sweatpants over the wetsuit. We then drove another 5 minutes to the cave entrance, which lay completely invisible to the eye amongst a beautiful landscape of rolling hills, where scenes from "The Hobbit" would be filmed only 5 days later, according to our feisty guide, Marcos.
Marcos gave us helmets, harnesses, and a brief lesson in abseiling (essentially sliding down a rope into a cave). My teenage buddy went first and then it was my turn.
Halfway down Marcos shouted my name and when I looked up, he squirted me with water from a hose. I reached the bottom quickly, but I regret not going after those who had abseiled before, because if I had, I would have followed their example and gone down much more quickly.
Water stood knee high on the floor of the cave, the entrances to its two darkened halves looming impressively, with the light falling between them from the meadow above.
When everyone had reached the bottom safely, Marcos shimmied down after us, armed us each with a rubber inner tube to sling over our shoulders, and marched us into one of the two openings to the cave. After five minutes, we reached the first of a series of tight spaces to crawl through. It involved climbing downward, face first, so in I went....
... and out I came.
As we ventured deeper into the cave, Marcos told us the history of its discovery and interesting facts about its ecosystem including the glowworms and eels. Upon hearing mention of the latter, I laughed, having told him on the ride over that my only fear was of eels. At the time he had replied, "Tons of them in the caves." I had thought he was joking. He wasn't. I averted my eyes whenever someone mentioned seeing one, which was often. But at the end of the traversable section tunnel, Marcos called our attention to one particularly friendly eel named Jesse, made famous by her tendency to linger in the same spot and allow herself to be petted in exchange for food. At the goading of the group, I swallowed my fear and touched her. Not so bad. But I'm still terrified of salt-water dwelling moray eels.
We then turned around and headed back into the light. When we reached the other entrance, Marcos directed us to plop ourselves into our tubes and float downstream. As we did this, he thumped the heel of his hand onto his own tube causing the ceiling of the cave to illuminate with thousands of glowworms reacting to the sound. We lay in our tubes, drifting silently looking up at the brilliant pseudo-celestial spectacle above.
Having floated downstream, we had to trek back upstream. We stopped for several more crawling challenges along the way, as well as for the opportunity to launch ourselves backwards from a particularly high ridge, holding our tubes against our rear ends.
All that remained was to climb our way back out, which we did strapped back into our harnesses. The climb proved tricky, as I couldn't feel my toes after splashing through so much cold water, but it was also short, so I quickly made it up.
At the top, one of our group attempted to take a picture of a bunch of sheep grazing nearby, but they kept scampering off at our every approach. I joked that they knew we liked lamb chops. The obnoxious American girl scoffed, "That's barbaric," and proceeded to rant about how barbarians like me eat meat totally unnecessarily, how she could never live in New Zealand because of the "lack of biodiversity," and how everyone was picking on her for her beliefs, despite the fact that most of us just stared at her in bewilderment at her selfishness in getting up on a soapbox to bitch at us during a tour we had each paid good money for. Ugh. Some people.
Back at the ranch, we peeled off our many layers, showered, and parted. The 3-hour drive back to Auckland left me exhausted, so I simply parked the car, confirmed my plans for the weekend, and passed out cold immediately upon arriving at the hostel.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:Waitomo, New Zealand
No comments:
Post a Comment