Hello from Queenstown! Queenstown is beautiful, but more about that later. This is a post about my three-day "camping" trip to Rotorua, Waitomo, and Raglan. I set out on Monday morning with three new friends through Amanda with the intention of touring the Waitomo Caves on Monday, hiking the Tongariro Crossing on Tuesday, and exploring Rotorua on Wednesday. After some traffic, quick thinking, rearranging and more traffic, we ended up in Rotorua on Monday afternoon.
Rotorua is a thermal hot spot, leading to geysers, bubbling and colored pools, and steaming vents from the bellows of the earth all over town. Some of them are gated off and commercialized, and others are just on the side of the road. The air is full of sulfur-scented steam no matter where you go. We headed pretty immediately to the bubbling mud pools, which were hilarious. Think "plop, splop, gurgle, belch, schlorp". I'm going to attempt to get a video within this post because it was just too much.
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| Lake Rotorua |
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| Random steaming vents around town |
After the mud pools we headed to Kerosene Creek, which is basically like a hot tub in river form. There were lots of people there just relaxing, drinking, or hanging out. What a cool thing to have in your back yard!
It poured on Monday night, so we had to pack up wet tents, but we were super excited to get to the "Worm Tube"! We were signed up for the Black Abyss tour of the Waitomo Caves, which are famous for the glowworms that live there. We knew that we were going to get to tube down an underwater river illuminated by the glowing worms, hence our name for it, but it ended up being so much better. After some training, we each rappelled down a 100+ ft hole in the ground, took a zip line off a cliff into a starry glowworm sky, jumped off another drop into the underwater river, paddled ourselves upstream and then floated back with the glowworms lighting the way, jumped off a waterfall, climbed through rocky and muddy passages around the caves, and finally reemerged into the sunny afternoon by free-climbing up two waterfalls. What an adventure! We even bought the photo package, so here are a few:
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| Getting ready to drop into the rappelling hole |
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| A sampling of glow worms |
In case you were wondering, the little glowing dots are just the end of the worm. They use that dot to attract food (mostly young insects). When the little bugs fly towards the light, they get stuck in the long, sticky worm part that is hanging down from the dot, and then somehow are eaten. The whole thing is a lot more magical until you come close to some of those wormy stringy things hanging down from the ceiling.
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| Our tour group after rinsing off most of the mud |
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| Emerging from the caves |
When we called the shuttle company at the Tongariro Crossing, we found out that the weather was looking bad enough for them to cancel shuttle service for the next day. It's too long to do as an out-and-back, so we made a quick decision to head towards the coast and ended up in Raglan for the night.
We got up in the morning and made the short walk to Bridal Veil Falls, which cascades 55 m down. It was pretty amazing that such a beautiful waterfall was so easily accessible, something I've thought of often around New Zealand.
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| View from the midpoint of the trail |
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| At the bottom |
Next we drove over to Ruapuke Beach, where we were hoping to see some surfers, but were pretty satisfied with the incredible black sand nonetheless. The color apparently comes from iron, so I was bummed I didn't have a magnet with me to test that out.
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| From the grassy dunes onto the beach |
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| Stereotypical beach picture for the color contrast |
On our way back in to the city, we stopped at the Auckland Botanic Gardens to have a look around. I learned about the plant that the Maoris use for weaving and get flax from, saw a bunch of sculptures, and lots of crazy flowers and trees.
Wednesday night I made a quick turnaround and was off to the airport at the crack of dawn on Thursday. Next post will be on Queenstown!
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