27/06/2010 Trip to Waitaimo.

So these entries have been written on my laptop and then copied over on my USB key because the Rotorua YHA charges by the minute, so it was way cheaper that way.


27/06/2010 Trip to Waitaimo.
I woke up early to catch a bus leaving at 0735 and to spend a bit of time rearranging the contents of my three food bags. They were in a minimum volume configuration but this meant that there was very little logical order to what was where and I wanted to have one bag with perishable stuff like cheese and another with lunch and snacks that could go in my daypack. We moved between nice sun and torrential downpour several times but I admired the brilliant greens of the grass on the rolling hills of the North Island. Very different scenery to the brown scrub or thick bush of the south. When we arrived I spent some time wandering around the i-site (the tourism info place throughout NZ, they will even book buses and trips for you without charging anything) reading the brochures. Waitaimo’s big draw is the limestone it sits on, or more specifically, the swiss cheese water has made of that limestone. The region has over 300 known and mapped caves of which 10-20 are commercially open to the public. I started off with going on two trips that could be covered in the afternoon, these were the really simple and safe ones, tiled floors and electric lighting. Kind of silly, and if I had thought things through a bit more I would probably have avoided them or gone for one of them in the morning I left. One of them had glow worms as it’s main draw, they were neat when we turned out the lights it was like looking at a bunch of green stars. Apparently the poo glows and attracts flying insects which are then caught in the sticky threads that hand from the worm. The worm itself isn’t really a worm but a larva of a creature that, when it matures, lives for only 4 days before dying to starvation because of a lack of a mouth.

The other one focussed more on just the cave formations. We weren't allowed to take photos in either for some reason (likely commercial). I call this method of charging for every little bit of extra on your trip, like photos, t-shirts etc "adventure capitalism."

When I got back to the i site to book my trips for the next day I learned that someone else wanted to book a trip that I had been unable to book earlier because I had been the only one at the time. However 2 was the min number, so I booked the next day on the 7 hour "lost world epic" which sounded fun, and was actually the best value for time underground, especially after you included the lunch and dinner they fed you.

So that will be my next blog post, maybe in the next 12hrs if the Taupo YHA has power for my laptop, maybe later.