Mud pies and caves

Trip Start Jul 24, 2007

Trip End Nov 11, 2007

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Flag of New Zealand Waitomo Caves, New Zealand
Wednesday, October 3, 2007

We went to the Te Puia Park this morning, well seven of us did its a geothermal Maori reserve in Rotarua with Geysers and Mud Pools. It also houses two Maori schools, one for weaving and one for carving and they teach the old traditional ways of doing both to native Maori and New Zealanders and you can go in and watch. The carving was pretty impressive. We had a guide show us round the park and then he took us into one of the Maori houses to play a Maori game which is a really simple stick throwing game but its sooo hard. The Maori's use it to teach and improve hand and eye co-ordination and they also encourage all their people to be ambidextrous so you have to use both hands and one should not be stronger than the other - the Maori's have no problem with that but the rest of us really struggled as we all usually have one stronger side - it was great fun though!!

So practically half the group got off the bus in Rotorua and decided to stay longer but as I have a pretty tight schedule and wanna see the south island as well I'm moving on. It depends on who you talk to as to which island comes out tops. I think from what conversation I've had with people who've done both already the south island is great for fantastic mountain scenery and skiing etc in the winter and also for extreme sports but the north island has its qualities as well. The scenery here cold only be described as beautiful as well but so far its been quite like the north english countryside only a bit bigger and more extreme - hills are bigger, trees are bigger etc etc so maybe thats where the notion that the south island is better comes from - english people!! If you ask a New Zealander they'll tell you that the better island is the one where they live whether that is south or north!!! New Zealanders really are quite proud of their country and of the Maori background.

So no free guided walk today we headed to a place called waitomo which is quite a small remote little town famous for the 360 caves which are located within a pretty small radius of the settlement - this is where you can do the extreme underground activities - black water rafting, abseiling, what us english call pot holing and other stuff.

Mud Pools

The idea of black water rafting kinda scared me so I decided to go down to the Ruakuri Caves which are a new caves system well the caves aren't new but they have only been opened up in the past 3 years. It was great, its the biggest cave system I've been in ever - it took nearly and hour and a half to walk round and we only had a small group so we weren't going slowly. The caves are limestone so inside them all the formations are white which isn't something I've seen before and the formations of stalagmites and stalagtites were the biggest I've ever seen as well. One part of it looked almost as though it could have been used to film the snow queen castle in Narnia (it wasn't though, I asked) it was really an amazing place. The Black Water Rafting company had spent 3 years doing extensive tests and research on the caves before they opened them up to make sure that what they would need to do engineering wise to allow foot access wouldn't damage the caves - they knew they existed because the black water rafting and abseiling trips use the same caves.

We saw the black water rafters while we were in the cave - black water rafting isn't white water rafting underground which was what I thought. you get a big black rubber ring, a wet suit (its god damn cold down there!!), and a hard hat with a light on and you sit in the ring and float down the under water stream. There are 2 small waterfall jumps and I think you have to do a bit of walking where the stream goes under ground too far and its fully guided so having seem them and quizzed our guide fully about how, when and what I decided that I wanted to do it but it was all fully booked for the next morning and that was the only time that I had to do it so I guess that'll be something else to add on to the list of things to do next time I am here (",)

Flea (our Kiwi driver) cooked us all a group meal tonight on the bbq at the hostel which was great, home made burgers with lots of salad mmmmm and it was a great way for the group to bond a bit more even though people hop on and off all the time everyone got pretty drunk -some way more than others but we have a late start tomorrow - well I do anyway!!