SpeLUNKing !

I have always been fascinated by caves. I find them absolutely seductive, really. I even love the sound of the word “spelunking” (although, I mean, how could you not?). So when I heard that the cave system stretches a 50 mile radius from the middle of New Zealand’s Waitomo region, you could say I was intrigued. When I found out that the caves are home to millions of glow worms, caving in Waitomo went straight to the top of my list of must-do’s in New Zealand.

This past weekend I made my first Kiwi road trip from Auckland to Waitomo and I was not let down. I like to think that I have done a lot of cool things in my life. And of all of those amazing adventures, exploring Waitomo’s underground caverns is probably the coolest. I decided to opt for the Rolls Royce of caving adventures in Waitomo, the Lost World Epic, which begins with a 100 meter abseil into a cave and continues for 4 hours upstream before daylight reappears.
My group consisted of an Aussie-Irish couple from Melbourne and five(!) Minnesotans (far and away the greatest number of Americans I’ve seen in one place for the last 3 months). We drove with our two guides, Scott and Gavin, about 20 minutes away from Waitomo Village where we geared up before heading towards the abseiling platform. We had to wear a full wetsuit with jacket and socks, as well as gumboots, helmet with headlamp, and climbing harness. We were instructed on clipping in and out of safety lines throughout the cave and then hiked down to the platform. One of the men in my team, Tim, had a dreadful time stepping over the ledge. We probably waited 30 minutes for him to get through tears and hyperventilation before stepping over the ledge. But to see him succeed was well worth the wait and made the abseil as much of a victory as an adventure. It also considerably extended the amount of time available for enjoying the absolutely stunning scenery. Again, I like to think that I have seen a lot of beautiful places in my life, but this was by far the most sublime. It was an absolute fairytale. I expected to see Peter Pan or Tinker Bell at any moment. I really have no words to describe the beauty of this place. Photos will have to be good enough, though they hardly do it justice.


Click here for more pictures from Waitomo.

After about a 20 minute descent we had lunch and then headed into the caved. The water was about 14 degrees (which is about 50 Fahrenheit), which actually didn’t seem so bad with the wetsuit. We climbed over rocks, to begin with and then we got in. Sometimes I could touch but sometimes not, and then I just held on to the cave walls or bobbed along pulling myself through the water in a sort of modified breaststroke fashion. For the more dangerous passes we clipped into the safety ropes. Some of these went over long drop-offs and one went through a waterfall over a 7 meter drop. That was also tricky for we of the short-legged kind—I was literally straddling a waterfall with 7 meters of empty air and rapids between me and the jagged rocks below, but I made it just fine. At one point we came upon a ledge with a pool below, so you can imagine what that precipitated. Cave jumping! I went twice, and loved it. It was probably only about a 3 meter fall, but I’ve never done that in a cave before, and found that the setting adds a really fantastic rush (to something I did daily in high school)! A little while after we did the jump, we reached a few crevices which required crawling GI Joe style under millions of tons of rock.

The passageways have names like “Shin Break Alley” and “Cow Hole” for rather sinister reasons. The first one’s pretty obvious but I’ll explain the second. Above the cave is a rolling pasture full of grazing cows and sheep. So you can imagine why “Cow Hole” is so-called. As we stood in the middle of it gazing up at the crack of daylight many meters above, one of the guides told us that years and years ago (the specific cave that we explored was discovered in 1906, mapped in the 40s, and finally commercialized in the 80s) a tour group like ours was coming through and stumbled on a cow laying right in the spot where we were standing. The tail end (haha) of the gruesome tale that ensued was that the body was devoured by eels, which are the river’s vultures. Few things in this world freak me out, but eels fall under this category, especially in this case where my imagination figures them as eyeless albino cave freaks with slimy yellow teeth. “Don’t worry, they’re talking about a tuna-like fish. It means something different than what you think,” one of my fellow Americans reassured me. ‘Ok’, I decided, ‘tuna’s still not great, but better than eel,’ and then I tried to forget that anything lives in the water. But later, in “Shin Break Ally” of all places, one of the guides spotted one. I didn’t see it but I didn’t need the reminder. About 45 minutes before we left the cave, the other guide told us to hurry over to the pool that he was hunched over and shining his headlamp into. And then I saw it. An eel. And no, not a tuna-like fish, but the slimy water serpent—AN EEL—that I had feared. The guide told us about its life cycle and how it is born in the river and feeds until it is large enough to head for saltwater where it decides whether it will be male or female and develops the appropriate parts and pieces. Then it swims all the way to Tonga where it mates and then goes all the way back to the river where it came from, and where its parents came from to lay its eggs. So that lent them just enough humanity to end my eel nightmares—that and the thing slithered over my foot to get away from the guide that was PETTING it. Ok, I can deal.

But the best part, the part where I thought again, ‘this is what I came to New Zealand for’, came just before we reached daylight again. Glow worms are an insect larva that lives in damp places where they can hang inverted, which is why they’re often found in caves. They don’t live in caves exclusively, but their lights go out under light, so the caves are a good place to see them any time of day. They spin a sticky thread which they dangle from their fluorescent hind-ends and use it to trap flying insects attracted to the light. We saw the first of them within moments of entering the cave and I stopped to admire them, as I’d been dying to see them ever since I first saw the Planet Earth episode called “Caves” in which they’re featured. The guide assured me that I’d see more glow worms and that there was quite a good spot to see them at the end of the tour. When we reached it everyone sat down and we all turned off our headlamps. Their green-blue phosphorescence illuminated the cathedral ceiling above and they stretched along the passage as far as I could. It left us all speechless and we sat there admiring them until it was time to leave. I have no idea how long we stopped there, but it could have been 5 minutes or it could have been 20 minutes, and no amount of time would have been long enough.

When we left the cave we crossed through the paddocks above the cave system we’d come through, passing “Cow Hole” along the way. When we arrived back at the base we took hot showers and enjoyed a barbeque dinner together before going back to Waitomo Village.
It was one of those things that was really amazing to do alone, but also something that I know I’ll do again when I come back to New Zealand in the future with someone I love. After all, spelunking is for spelovers!