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Day 18: Waitomo

 After leaving the farm, I headed to Waitomo Glowworm Caves. There are 3 caves which you can tour, however since it is the slow, winter season, only one of the tours is currently running. 

The tour starts off with a little history about how the caves were discovered and walking through a large ‘cathedral room’ where they have held holiday concerts with famous musical guests (the acoustics are apparently very good for music in this part of the cave). After walking down through the cave, we arrived at something like a dock where we boarded a small boat to travel the rest of the way through the caves. There are lights in certain places, and the tour guide has a flashlight (or torch as they call it) but most of the time these are all off so that we can see the glow worms. The worms live on the ceiling in certain parts of the cave and use the light they produce as a way of luring in their food. They also produce a web like substance which hangs down from the ceiling and can be seen when the lights are on. No photography is allowed until the very end when exiting the cave, so I don’t have any photos of the worms or the cathedral cave. 

There is a series of cables strung above the water which the tour guides use to move the boat from the ‘dock’ to the exit. The pictures below are from the end of the tour as we exit the caves and then walk back up to the visitor center. 



Although the other caves were not open, there was a trail near one of them that was still open for walking which was recommended to me by the owner of the farm AirBnB.




When I was done exploring, I got on the road to Rotorua. On the way there it started to rain, and in fact right when I parked in Rotorua it was dumping rain, but after sitting in my car for a few minutes, the rain stopped and I decided to chance a quick walk around. As I was driving through town, I started to smell something quite unpleasant. I worried it might be my car, but when I got out and still smelled the scent, I realized it was coming from the geothermal pools nearby! The pools were pretty to look at due to their turquoise color, but very unpleasant to smell the sulfur that permeated most of the downtown area.



I also saw the outside of the Blue Pools and the Rotorua Museum, but both were closed and appeared to be under renovation.





My walk around town was rather brief due to the smell, the weather, and the closure of the museum (I had been hoping to go inside) so I headed to my next AirBnB which was just outside of town, on Lake Rotoiti. Thankfully, this was far enough that the sulfur smell was not present. Here I stayed in a 1 bedroom apartment (the converted 1st floor of a 2story house) which had a walkway right up to the lake.






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