Awesome Caves!!!

Daddy’s weird plan also includes a bit about Zander and I planning days. My day was yesterday and I was supposed to find something to do at Tongariro Mountain (a.k.a. Mt Doom from Lord of the Rings) like ski or something but it turned out that it cost like $700 for us all to ski there so we obviously didn’t do that. Then momma suggested we go to the Waikomo Glowworm Caves instead. Then daddy went online and bought the tickets for us to see all three caves and drove us there the next morning. As you can see I had a lot of help planning this trip and I am not complaining.

The next morning we drove to Waikomo and ate lunch at the visitor’s center. The visitor’s center was really cool because it had a big wood frame with a plastic blow- up cover thing over it. After lunch we drove over to the mouth of the first cave. After a super short walk we went in the mouth. It was lit only by the guide’s flashlight which was really dim. Just as I was thinking holy crap that’s what we are going into a cave with she pushed a button and that cave go all lit up. They had wired it all that way through with lights illuminating the coolest formations. We walked through the cave on a metal walkway and saw a lot of stalactites, stalagmites and a bunch of other really cool formations. The guide told us about how the Maori thought it was good luck to have a stalactite drip on you. If that’s true my life just got good because my hair was soaked when I got out of that thing.

After that we went to the glow worm cave. The guide for that one was really stupid. In the beginning he was all ‘I understand not all of you speak English so I’ll speak slowly’ and from then on he talked to us like we were two. The cave its self was really cool. We walked through it for a little while and then we went to a platform thing above a river and the guide talked about how glow worms have sticky strings of mucus hanging down from their mouths that catches mosquitoes. Then he turned on a light so we could see them. It was pretty gross. Then we got on a boat on the river and looked at the glow worms on the ceiling while the guide pulled us along by a rope. The glow worms glowed green in clusters and patterns on the ceiling. The guide said that it takes about a month for them to eat a mosquito. Another guide later told us that if you yell really loud it makes them glow brighter but this guide said we had to be totally silent. I really didn’t like him at all.

When we got out we went back to the visitor’s center and waited a few minutes until a bus came to pick us up for the next one. The guide for that one was really cool and she showed Sarah how to magically open the doors to the cave by waving your hand over it and saying the magic word. It was really funny and she totally fell for it. The cave was cooler than the other ones because there were different formations called curtains and some cave coral. There were also stalactites, stalagmites, and a stalagpipe (ok, just kidding, that last one was actually an old metal pipe coming down through the cave ceiling through which they lowered materials and the workers’ lunches). We saw some glow worms up close and they look really nasty. We also saw their mucus “fishing lines” up close. It was cool how much mucus they could hang from the ceiling each. It was also really creepy to think that there was spit hanging from the ceiling.