Day 22- Waitomo Caves

Yesterday was great, because we ended up hiking up around a cliff overlooking the ocean. It was amazing to see an island off the beach, home to a gannet colony as well as seeing waves crashing against the beach from above. The weather was beautiful! However, since there was a tsunami in Japan the night before (3/11) the waves were going to hit the New Zealand coast while we were at the beach on Saturday. Thus, halfway into surveying the beach (dune height, sediment type, etc.) we got kicked off of the beach because they ended up closing all of the beaches in Auckland for a while. Never before have I been kicked off of a beach due to tsunami warnings! The tsunami didn’t really have that big of an impact on the New Zealand coastline anyway.

The whole tsunami was scary though because I’ve got a friend in Tokyo. I found out that shell that she’s doing well though! It’s pretty crazy that once I’m stationed in the Pacific Ocean all of these crazy events are occurring, like an earthquake in Christchurch, NZ and then an earthquake and tsunami off of Japan. I’m hoping this will be the end of crazy geologic events!

So then last night we had a bucket party, where everyone pitches in money and everyone drinks out of a bucket with really long straws. Then, we ended up going out but my friend Anna had too much to drink, so Olly and I ended up having an ambulance come and make sure she was okay and help us escort her back to her room.

So today was WONDERFUL! I went with Jo, Bart, Flora, Njeri, Hania, Hannah, and Arleah to the glow worm caves in Waitomo. There are over 300 caves in this area, and they’re all SO cool. There’s tons of companies that offer tours of the caves, and we went with Rap, Raft, and Rock. For $149 we ended up abseiling down 30 meters (about ninety feet), which is basically repelling down a crack in the earth, where you control the rate at which you go down based on how tightly you hold the rope. It was SO COOL! After that we toured the caves, rode tubes down parts of them and over some rapids, and hiked up some areas. Although the entire cave was over 6 km deep, we only go to see about 1 km of it. The BEST part was seeing the glow worms, which cover the ceilings of the limestone caves. The glow worms are actually a form of maggot, or fly larvae, where their rear ends glow. When we turned our headlamps off we could see thousands of glowing greenish dots only about 4 meters over our heads. It was absolutely incredible! Other highlights of the trip were going through “squeezes” which were really tight spaces that you have to wiggle your way through in the walls of the rock, which are SO scary. In one of the places I almost got stuck, but luckily made my way out! We also got to pet one of the 2 foot long eels in the cave, a girl eel named Jeff. Finally, once we were done in the caves, we climbed up a rock face that was about 90 feet back up! So exhausting but probably my favorite day in New Zealand thus far!

I also got some great pictures because our tour guide took photos of us at every step along the way. I’ll show you the rest when I get back to Connecticut!!