Over, Under, and Through

Today's adventures took us to some very unusual places. We had a free afternoon in the Hamilton area, as Frank's motorcycle swap meet isn't until tomorrow, so we decided to check out the Waitomo glowworm caves, southwest of Hamilton. These limestone caves were discovered in the 1860's and have been a tourist attraction ever since. The glowworms are the larval phase of a mosquito-like insect. They live on the cave ceilings, drop strings of sticky mucous down (yuk!), and then glow with bioluminescence to attract flying insects to feed on. The site has had some bad luck over the past few years. As the charred tree here shows, they had a big fire that destroyed their gate buildings last year, and the year before all the caves were flooded out by a spring with unprecedented high rainfall. I couldn't help but think of Gandalf's line in Lord of the Rings, "I haven't come through fire and flood to bandy words with a witless worm!" (ok, ok, he says fire and death--close enough!).


Regardless, in we went to try our wits against the worms. The first part of the tour is a walk through caverns full of the expected stactites and stalagmites, but at the deepest level you reach the river and enter a boat, and all the lights go out. The effect is of being under a black night sky filled with more stars than you've ever seen. Marvelous! There are no photos allowed in the caves, but here's a bit of the rock formations and one of the boats at the cave mouth, and the pretty river that flows through the caverns.



Afterwards, we took a walk through the forest reserve nearby and found ourselves squeezing through more unusual rock formations.


Next we headed further west, sort of randomly choosing the road that leads to the harbour at Kawhia. It turned out to be a lucky choice. The road wound through beautiful valleys, and the harbour village was very picturesque, with lots of unusual boats, and local children enjoying the shallow waters.




It also had pitch black volcanic sand which, at low tide as it was when we were there, turned to wonderfully sticky mud, as these local boys' feet show!


We also happened upon this young lady and her champion marlin catch!


Another short drive took us over to the ocean side of the harbour where another surprise awaited us. We toiled up huge dunes of more black sand, only to find the downward slopes covered in massive clumps of pink-plumed pampas grass shimmering in the wind. It was truly a magnificent sight.



We finished off the day with a very Canadian-style Pizza Hut pizza in front of the TV, watching The Full Monty! A good day.