A Caving Advenure - Waitomo, New Zealand

A bacon sandwich to start the day as we set off to do a caving adventure tour in Waitomo meaning we had to be on the bus for 7:30am. There were a couple that we knew from our south island bus also doing the Abyss today so we waited for the bus together. A minibus arrived just after 7:30 and we were on our way to the caves. We got to the centre about an hour before the actual tour started and as I was struggling to open the lock on my large bag I just took it off the bus so the driver could leave. I continued to struggle with my poundland lock (I guess it is to be expected, it had been stiff for quite sometime) eventually I got the lock off and managed to get my towel and swim shorts as it turned out we needed them. I did actual struggle to even get the key out of the lock, I don't think I be using it again.

Snappy and Andy were going to be our guides for the day and we had about 10 people in our group for the Abyss. We started by getting all the gear that we would need which included: wet suit, waterproof soaks, a wet suit jacket, thermal top (Ollie got one of these), helmet with light, a couple of carabina, and a device I can't remember the name of which allowed us to abseil. We then had a short drive out to the hole we would be abseiling down and a quick lesson on how to abseil before taking it in turns to abseil the 30 metres into the cave. Me and Ollie had a bit of a wait at the top cause we decided to go in last but we would only have had to wait in the cave anyway. We both abseiled down with relative ease although a couple of points I decided that I was going to fast so stopped myself a little abruptly which hurt my back a little bit.

Once in the cave we could see a few glow-worms with our light turned off then we were off through the cave along a few narrow passage which took us to a zip-wire known as the flying fox. This would allowed us to get down to the next part of the cave otherwise it was a 20 metre drop into relatively shallow water. Once everyone was down the bottom we all sat over the edge about a 5 metre drop to the water to have a hot drink and a biscuit little did we know that we would be jumping off the rock onto our tubes (rubber rings) a few moments later. We were then told by Andy to jump off the rock and land on the tube, I was convinced that I was just going to fall out to the tube straight away but managed to stay in but oh my the water was pretty darn cold, bit of a shock to the system.

We then went tubing down the river feeling pretty cold to begin with when we stopped briefly to turn out our light and check out the glow worms, which Snappy told us were really just glowing fly lava that first of all fed off their brothers and sisters before forming their maggot stage on the walls and finally reaching their fly stage surviving for just enough days to mate where the male would die and the female would die after giving birth, so really we were in glow-maggot caves. We continued to tube down the river before briefly stopping and then going the other way back to where we originally jumped on the tubes. We then were told we were getting of the tube and wading for the rest of the trip this initial bust of water into the wetsuit made us very cold again.

We then explored parts of the cave wading through some deep water and some very shallow water always nearly falling over because of the constant change of depth of water under our feet and rocks. We waded down a couple of small waterfalls before getting to some very deep water where we swam/waded under a narrow gap in the rock.

The final part of the expedition would have us climb up two waterfalls and we were told that it was pretty tricky but we would be given guidance of where to put our feet and hand so we could climb up. The first waterfall was a good 5 metres high and wasn't too difficult to climb but really did look it when you saw other people doing it. The second wasn't quite so high and wasn't quite as hard to climb up but it had no pool of water at the bottom to fall back into if you did slip! We both made it over the two waterfalls with relative ease and then proceeded out of the tunnel to see daylight for the first time in a couple of hours.

We then caught the bus to Rotorua where we arrived at about 6pm.