We started our vacation driving up the Kapiti Coast and around Mt Taranaki to New Plymouth. I wanted to visit New Plymouth, since it was named New Zealand’s Top City for 2008. We stayed at a B&B close to the city centre that seemed nice but had paper-thin walls. We only had 24 hours there but got to explore the place, see its great views, shop at its stores and see its Festival of Lights event. All together it was a very nice city to visit and I could see how it could be named most beautiful city. It was a bit small for my liking though, and I don’t think there are many software companies in the area. It is a great place to visit, but probably not to live.
After a day in New Plymouth we drove to Waitomo. Wai is Maori for water and tomo means hole, so Waitomo means “water hole”. There are over 300 caves in the area; we visited three. We arrived too late in the day to do any caving so we stayed in that night, watched a little tv and did some relaxing. The next day we set out on our day of caving. After an average cup of coffee we went on the Ruakuri tour. We were in a group of about 14, walking, and the tour went for about two hours. Ruakuri was the best cave of the three in my opinion; it had glowworms, an underground waterfall and impressive rock formations. There was a challenge about halfway through where they had a long pipe that went up to the surface that the builders used to bring the concrete down in. The guide asked us to guess how far underground we were from looking though this pipe. Our guide told us that she only had a handful of people get it right in the year she had been working there, and I guessed correctly that it was 65m.
After some lunch that consisted of the most amazing thin crust pizza we went on the Aranui cave tour. This tour was a lot shorter than Ruakuri but was just as impressive. The part I liked about this tour was that they showed a lot more formations that had names to them, while Ruakuri just had nice formations. Aranui also had some cave wetas (big bugs!) sitting on the walls that Ruakuri did not; I’m just glad they stayed on the walls and weren’t jumping onto me. After Aranui we went to our last cave, which was the glowworm cave. This cave is the most popular in the area and they cram tourists through at a very high rate. They started the tour with an introduction on cave formations, the different types of formations and the general cave knowledge. It might have been interesting if we hadn’t already heard it several times before in the previous caves. All in all I thought the cave part of the glowworm cave to be pretty average. After the cave portion they took us in boats to where the really cool stuff was. Thousands and thousands of glowworms covered the roof of the cave, way too many to count. The boat ride was short but awesome. After the glowworm cave we headed off to Rotorua.
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