We stayed in a farm just north of Waitomo with goats, deer and perhaps the ugliest pigs I’ve ever seen in my life. Apparently they were particularly feisty because their wives/girlfriends had been separated into a different pen. In comparison, the St. Fagan’s pigs are actually quite beautiful.
We started the day off with a small hike (6km ish), we chose an unnamed route on All Trails that, despite being very scenic, was too overgrown. We had a team talk halfway and decided to circle back via the roads instead – 100kph speed limit and no pavement made this quite hairy. We could barely hear the cars approaching over Rory Stuart and Alastair Campbell chatting breeze through our speaker.
In Otorohanga we found our fave coffee spot to date, ‘Fat Kiwi’. Awesome coffee (Supreme) and some naughty baked goods. I also finally got around to trying the NZ smoked salmon fillets which were so good, although it felt like a crime eating them next to a bin in a carpark. The locals think Grace looks like Anne Hathaway, I see more Anne Widdecombe. Super small world, I bumped into a school friend in Tongariro so we had a 10-year debrief in the Thirsty Weta bar.
As a region Waitomo was historically underwater, over millions of years the corals, seashells, skeletons and organisms have been compressed to create a limestone crust up to 2m thick! This limestone, coupled with the heavy rainfall and topography makes for perfect cave territory. Waitomo is riddled with caves, sinkholes and vertical shafts. 300 caves have been mapped and these are just the ones that have been officially recorded.
These caves are full of bioluminescent glow worms and you can only find them in the East coast of Aus and NZ. The glow worm boat tour was one of the most amazing things we’ve done. Once we’d ventured down into the cave, it took a while for our eyes to adjust to the total darkness and it felt like sensory deprivation. We were down there for an hour with no (artificial) light and almost no noise.
The glow worms covered the cave ceilings like a blanket of neon blue lights and as time went on and our eyes adjusted, the lights intensified and they seemed to multiply.
The glow worms are the larvae of fungus gnats. The gnats lay the eggs in isolated groups to make sure that the first born glow worm doesn’t eat all the other eggs! The glow worms live in little hammocks they’ve made, just off the face of the rock. They set threads (traps) up to 7 inches to catch their prey (mayflies). The surrounding area of the cave mouths are protected and nurtured by the locals. This includes planting specific tree species to attract mayflies. This in turn ensures the glow worm populations continue to thrive.
Words (and pictures) can’t do it justice.
Welsh Rare-bits 
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