Lins and Rich’s Travel Blog

Leaving Auckland for the second time, we headed to the Coromandel Peninsular to do a day’s sight-seeing en-route to Waitomo.  Well, I say en-route; it is, in fact, quite a major detour, however, our sense of distance has altered somewhat since being in Oz and we now adopt quite a different attitude to the idea of going an extra couple of hundred kilometres to see something of interest.  After a morning in the car, we reached hot water beach where you can use your spade to dig a couple of feet into the sand at one particular point on the beach and you will be rewarded with your own pool of hot water to bathe in.  Or, alternatively, you can borrow someone else’s hole if you don’t have time / a spade to dig your own! 

Next, we headed a little further around the coast to the starting point of the walk to Cathedral Cove.  The walk took about 1/2 hour and was constantly fluctuating in many senses - the sun was shining, then it was raining, then sunny again; the path took as down then up then down again.  We arrived at the cove itself, which we think was named because of the hole that goes right through the land over the beach, forming an enormous arch, and spent about 20 minutes there before we had to rush off back over the hills to the car so that we could get to Waitomo before the hostel reception closed.

4 hours later we arrived at Juno Backpackers Hostel in Waitomo.  The hostel was really homely and, shortly after dinner, I got into my pyjamas, bought my duvet into the lounge and sat and watched films with the others at the hostel.  It felt just like sitting in your own front room!  We had booked the ‘Rap, Raft, Rock’ experience for the next day as we’d been told it was a great way to see the glowworm caves in Waitomo and I had thought it sounded really exciting.  Until I saw the pictures.  And spoken to people who’d done something similar that day.  Then I was scared. 

Overnight I decided I may not be rapping, rafting and rocking after all so dragged Rich out of bed early in the morning to go to the office of the company we were going with to get some reassurance from them.  Once they’d convinced me I wouldn’t be spending 3 hours in a confined space with the cave roof just above my head and the cave walls inches from my  body, I felt much better and was really excited about the afternoon.

We went back to the office at 1.45 and met the two New Yorkers, Martina and Kim, that would also be in our group that afternoon.  They are just in New Zealand for a holiday for a couple of weeks and were great fun.  We all piled into the van and were driven onto an off-road track to a couple of large lock-ups.  There, we were kitted out with wetsuits, gumboots, ridiculous hobbit-like trousers, helmets, gloves and harnesses.  We were then dirven further down the track to the cave’s entrance. 

Well, I say cave’s entrance.  I mean 27 metre sheer drop into the mouth of the cave.  We abseiled down into the cave one at a time and then grabbed our tubes and started our walk into the cave.  On the way upstream we were shown the eels and other wildlife living in the water running through the cave.  Then we were told we were going for a walk in the dark.  The torches were switched off and the glowworms began to glow.  After the eyes had had a little while to adjust, the roof of the cave looked like the starry sky at night, though we could still see nothing else.  We were instructed to take in what we could see and then the instructor made a noise that rang through the cave and made us all jump out of our skins.  He created the “boom” by throwing the tube flat onto the water.  The result was incredible; the glowworms respond to this by glowing more brightly, and those worms that weren’t already glowing, begin to glow, therefore the visibility in the cave increases immensely.  We went form being able to barely see our own hands in front of our faces, to being able to see the person 3 people ahead of us - vaguely!

The black-water rafting was nowhere near as extreme as it sounds.  The water level was really low and, most of the time, we were pretty much having to push ourselves along on the tubes! 

Then began the scary the bit - I had been told the the small holes would be optional, but of course the guide encouraged me to go through them, even though I technically could have walked around them.  So I squeezed myself through some gaps that I didn’t feel comfortable with, but I guess I got some satisfaction from knowing I’d managed them without having a nervous breakdown!

Then came the long wade back upstream to the mouth of the cave.  Martina and I were both completely knackered and our thighs felt thoroughly toned by the time we got back to the start, whereas Rich had managed to follow the tracks of the guide and had found all the shallow bits to save his legs. 

When we got back, it was completely dark and the 20m rock climb to get out of the cave was still ahead of us.  The guide obviously went up first and made it look easy, then he fed the safety rope down to us and we made our way up, one by one.  I went second and while Kim shouted encouragement from the top and Martina and Rich shouted from the bottom, I whizzed up the easy first few metres, then came to a complete stop when I got to a vertical section and couldn’t work out where to put my feet next.  I knew I had to keep going upwards, there was nobody there to tell me which way to go, and I just didn’t seem to have legs long enough to reach the footholds I could see!  It was a challenge.  Still, it only took aroun 5 minutes and I was pretty chuffed once I go to the top.  Rich came up last and managed to come up so quickly that we thought the instructor was feeding the rope back down to him, then we realised he was actually reeling it in as Rich was moving up the rock face - impressive!  And so ended our expedition into caving - and we loved it!

The following day, we drove down to Rotorua, giving a lift to a guy from Holland who was hitching his way around the North Island and who had stayed in our room the night before and asked if we were going that way.

We dropped him off at the edge of town and then booked ourselves in to the Funky Green Voyager Backpackers, a great hostel in the town centre.  We then went to Rainbow Springs to experience the kiwi encounter.  This is a guided tour around the centre where they are breeding kiwis to try to increase their numbers in the wild.  The kiwis that are hatched here and released back into the wild once they way 1-1.2kg (too big for stoats to eat them) have around a 60-70% chance of survival as opposed to the 5% chance they have when the hatch in the wild - pretty impressive.  We had an excellent guide who informed us about the lives of kiwis and the work of the centre and we got to see a few kiwis who will not be released as they have been sick or are being used for breeding.

The evening was taken up with a sociable game of poker with a group of Germans and some other Brits at the hostel.  There was a great crowd and a great vibe at this hostel.

The next morning we went to Hell’s Gate.  My mum has just informed me I’ve been here before too and there are photos to prove it, but I don’t remember it…and I’m fairly certain I didn’t get to have a mud bath treatment last time I was there.  We took a walk around the park, which is made up of bubbling mud pools, hot water (and I mean dangerously hot) pools and steaming, sulphurous lakes, and then we had a mud bath spa treatment.  This involved climbing into a hot pool of muddy water, smothering oursleves in the mud, relaxing there for 20 minutes, taking a cold shower (not a pleasant experience), and then relaxing in 2 hot water pools.  After our final hot shower to get ourselves clean and to rid our skins of the smell of sulphur, we both felt thoroughly chilled out and had very smooth skin.

That afternoon we went to see Janice and Peter, friends of my mum and dad, who I haven’t seen since I stayed with them in Rotorua when I came out here 20 years ago.  Unsurprisingly, their first comment was that it was like being in a room with my mum 30 years ago!  They had kindly agreed to receive our post as the bloody banks keep introducing new security measures and we needed new cashcards as a result.  We had a great afternoon catching up with them and telling tales of our travels but we soon had to head off as we had booked a Maori cultural experience for the evening.

The Mitai cultural experience was a great evening out.  We got to see our dinner being cooked in the traditional ‘hangi’, see Maoris in traditional dress paddle a traditional canoe, watch a performance of various Maori dances, songs and skills, learn a bit of the haka, and eat far too much excellent food - they’d even cooked stuffing to go with the chicken for the benefit of the British tourists!

On our final day in Rotorua, I got to fulfil another long-time ambition; I got together with a group of others in the hostel and we went white-wter rafting on the grade 5 Kaituna river.  It was amazing.  So much fun.  We even managed to stay upright when going over the 7m waterfall.  There was one drawback though - the water is absolutely freezing at this time of year and we only had sleeveless wetsuits and a fleece on - apparently it’s hard to paddle with a full-sleeve wetsuit.  I pointed out it’s also hard to paddle with numb arms and hands!

After one final game of poker last night, we left the hostel this morning and have now arrived in Taupo.  We came via Wai-O-Tapu, a large park full of more sulphurous water, immense craters and bubbling mud pools.  I’m fairly sure I do remember this one from last time I was here, but mum will probably tell me now I didn’t go there before!  The piece de la resistance at this park was the Lady Knox geyser.  This geyser spits water 20m up into the air; naturally this occurs every 24-72 hours, but the park owners give it a helping hand to do so at 10.15 every morning by putting soap into it - some prisoners discovered this effect when they were held here as part of an open prison about 100 years ago and came here to wash their clothes.

We were hoping to do the Tangariro Crossing from Taupo but it seems as though this is unlikely to be possible as the weather conditions have to be really good as the crossing can be dangerous and the hostel owner told us when we arrived today that it unlikely to be open before Monday at the earliest.  On top of this, Rich has a cold and it is a very physically demanding walk and should only be attempted when you’re fully fit.  So I think we’re just going to hire some mountain bikes for the day tomorrow and head out to the Huka falls.  The other option is a sky dive but I think we’ve decided money and common sense won’t allow it!