Glow Worm Caves
Trip Start
Oct 09, 2008
1
28
64
Trip End
Ongoing
Waitomo Caves, North Island, New Zealand
Saturday, December 13, 2008
"I'm supposed to stop everyone to tell them to adhere to the 30km per hour speed limit," he said shaking his head. "An old lady came through here earlier and ruined it for everybody."
"Is she okay?" I asked, concerned.
"What? Yeah, she's okay. Barely. She sped through here at 80 kilometers per hour and a few of the guys got angry and threw rocks at her car. But they missed."
And with that poignant lesson from the road, we continued on our way to Waitomo, home of the world famous Waitomo Glow Worm Caves
Baa Ram Ewe!
. There are over two hundred of these caves in the region, and there are about half a dozen companies offering tours. After careful consideration, we chose a five hour excursion from a company called Rap, Raft & Rock. This turned out to be the best thing I did during my month in New Zealand. The company intentionally kept things shrouded in secrecy, so we wouldn't know what to expect when we got down there. Our guide was a Brit named Neil who had moved to New Zealand four years ago. Most of his upper body was covered in tattoos, and he had plans to tattoo the rest during his holiday break. It would take four artists working simultaneously for forty to fifty hours, he said. On his chest he planned to get a zombie geisha, on his stomach two samurai sword fighting, and on his back a Japanese mask. "What kind of mask?" I asked, figuring it must have special significance to the man who planned to have it on his back forever. I was wrong. "I don't know, mate," said Neil. "I'll ask after I get it done."
Neil's shtick was similar to that of every guide or operator you'll ever have when participating in an extreme sport. Every word out of his mouth was sarcastic, his answer to every question designed to try to leave the group feeling as uneasy as possible (thereby heightening our fear and theoretically heightening our enjoyment)
Absail practice
. Neil claimed it was only his third day on the job. When it came time to distribute safety equipment, he told a Greek girl that her harness was brand new. "Yours is old and shabby," he said as he handed one to Mikeo, then turned to me. "Yours wasn't designed to hold someone as large as you, Caveman." From here on out, that was my nickname. Along with the harness, we each put on a wetsuit, a helmet, sweatpants, and rubber boots. Neil drove us out into the countryside and onto a farm full of sheep. From there we walked into a trench where the earth suddenly opened up below us into a huge underground cave. Neil gave us a quick lesson in absailing (read: rappelling), told us not to be afraid of the eels down there, and assured us that at least five of the six of us would probably make it out alive.
I was first to absail down into the cave. Twenty-seven meters underground with a waist-deep river flowing at the bottom. While I was waiting for the rest of the group to come down, lo and behold I saw a three foot long eel swimming against the current in the river. When Neil came down last, he asked, "Has anyone seen any eels yet?" Yes, we had. We thought you were joking. "Nope," said Neil. "Wait till you see the big one down this tunnel."
We each picked up an inner tube, turned on our helmet lamps and waded upstream into one of the big caves
Absailing down into the cave
. We got to a deep section of the water, where Neil commanded me to wade into an area that was up to my shoulders. "Dip your head under water," he shouted. I knew I was being set up for some sort of joke, but I did as I was told. Once I'd been underwater, Neil walked the rest of the group around and shone his light on a spot directly to my left, where there hovered a six foot eel with the circumference of a loaf of bread. He explained that these eels are able to smell anything within a twenty meter radius. They have hundreds of extremely sharp, inward-facing teeth, and they feed on cows and sheep that happen to fall into the cave. In fact, up and down the cave walls you could see the bones of such unfortunate livestock. There seemed to be a disproportionate number of jawbones lying around. "I don't like him," said Neil. "Another guide feeds him, so he always expects food. When he doesn't get it, he gets grumpy, he gets aggressive, and then he bites."Next Neil sat us down on a dry section of the cave and told us to turn off our headlamps. As our eyes started to adjust to the darkness, Neil took his inner tube and loudly banged it twice against the surface of the water. What happened next was positively magical. Hundreds and hundreds of pinpricks of blue light resembling a starry night sky covered the entire ceiling and was getting brighter. These were the famous glow worms. "Well, it's not exactly the worms themselves that glow," Neil explained. "And actually, they're not even worms. They're actually gnat fly larvae. They spend nine months growing from larvae into flies. While they're in their cocoon stage there is no exit chute for their feces, so what you're actually seeing is burning maggot poo. But 'burning maggot poo caves' doesn't have quite the same ring to it as 'glow worm caves' so there you go." It was a magnificent sight. Neil continued to explain that the burning poo was meant to attract food--spiders, mosquitoes, other gnat flies--into a sticky little web and that the larvae would then feed on anything caught in their web
Waitomo Caves
. The more hungry the larvae get, the brighter the poop glows. They also respond to loud noise, which is why Neil banged his inner tube against the water. After nine months the larvae become a full grown gnat fly, that flies out of the cave and into the sunlight. A male gnat fly will fly around for four days trying to impregnate as many female flies as possible, then it will die. As soon as a female fly is impregnated, it flies back down into the cave and lays its eggs. The females live only for two days. Then the cycle starts all over again. There's no particular season for mating; it happens all year, and all of the larvae in the caves are at different stages of their nine month growth period. We hopped aboard our inner tubes and rode the river back to our starting point, all the while with our helmet lamps turned off, staring up at all the glow worms on the ceiling. They call this "blackwater rafting". Back at the starting point we followed the river down into another big cave. Neil had saved the best part for last. The six of us lay back and put our feet up on the tube in front of ours, with that person's arms locked around our feet. Neil then grabbed hold of the first tube and ran/waded as fast as he could for two hundred yards with the chain of tubes and passengers in tow The effect was that we rocketed down this stretch of underground river and in this cave the ceiling and its stalactites were covered with a much thicker density of glow worms. There were thousands upon thousands. Take my word for it, a spectacular sight. I have never seen anything remotely like it.
The last thing we did was try to squeeze through a bunch of tiny spaces like real spelunkers do. Despite my suspicions that Neil was again messing with me, I agreed to swim underwater and into a tiny opening that Neil insisted I could fit through
Waitomo Caves
. I was not fooled, nor would I be fitting through that hole anytime soon. "Gotcha, Caveman!" shouted Neil. "Not even Nicole Ritchie could fit through there!" He thought this was the funniest thing in the world. I did manage to squeeze through two of the next three crawlspaces. I was simply too big for one of them. Another I barely, barely got through. For a few moments I was really trapped between two rock walls with my feet hanging off the ground. I had a legitimate panic attack. I managed to remove my head lamp battery pack from around my waist, put both arms up above my head, and wiggle into the little crawlspace which thankfully opened up a bit wider a few meters farther ahead. As we were walking back towards the exit, a middle-aged woman in our group took a hard fall sideways in the river, and bashed her head and arm against a sharp rock. Luckily her helmet protected her head, but she was unable to move some of the fingers on her left hand. This put an abrupt end to Neil's jokes, suddenly he was very concerned. He offered Caveman's services carrying her inner tube back, which I happily did. Climbing up and out of the caves with one arm was no easy feat for her (we had to climb up the same sheer rock face we'd absailed down), but she put on a brave face and got up there eventually. As we were waiting I looked around into the big cave mouths and asked if anybody had seen The Descent. It's probably better that they hadn't.
