Glow-in-the-dark Bliss
Sun Herald
Sunday October 15, 2000
IT'S A cliche but a good one. Nothing can describe the glow-worms on the cave walls and ceiling above the underground river as clearly as by saying they look like constellations of stars.
Yet the Milky Way never looked this bright on its best night, nor this massive and close. And no-one has viewed the stars while drifting through the blackness in an inner tube on a river 65m underground.
Welcome to Black Water Rafting, a uniquely New Zealand adventure that leaves participants with a feeling of exhilaration and the knowledge that they did something they had never dreamt of.
``I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't that," said Lorraine Daniels, a nurse and grandmother from New York, who not only had never been in a cave before, but had never worn a wetsuit, never mind leapt from an underground waterfall.
``It was just wonderful. I admit I was apprehensive when we had to jump off the waterfall backwards in the dark, but I loved it."
The area around Waitomo is called King Country from an effort by Maoris to establish a British-style monarchy during the Maori land wars 150 years ago.
About three hours' drive south of Auckland, the ground under the brush-covered hills and sheep pastures is riddled with caves like the holes in Swiss cheese. The caves were formed by acidic rainfall eating away at the limestone in the 30 million years since the ancient sea floor thrust skywards.
The Maoris named the region from their words for water, wai, and a hole in the ground, tomo. Several creeks and rivers carved chains of caverns, some of which run 24km. Many are ablaze with the unique glow-worms that have drawn tourists for 100 years.
In 1987, some enterprising Kiwis realised that if you put people in wetsuits and equipped them with a light, a helmet and an inner tube, they could float and scramble along these underground streams for an adventure the likes of which could be found nowhere else in the world. The cavers also wear white rubber boots that protect their feet and give them good purchase on slippery rocks.
While several companies offer trips, Black Water Rafting was the first and has two versions, a three-hour trip that involves cave scrambling and tubing (about $A70) and a five-hour trip that includes rappelling down cliffs and climbing beside an underground waterfall (about $A120). Both are marvellous, but the shorter trip, about two hours of it underground, can be made by reasonably fit people of any age.
``That was awesome, just awesome," said one visitor, Margaret Johnston, climbing back into the light at the end of the three-hour journey.
``You know, I expected ... oh, I don't know, I guess the smooth paths and handrails and tamed-down kind of thing you get in other places. I never dreamt I'd be climbing up and down rocks, jumping into the river and squeezing through those narrow places like that.
``What's really funny is that I'm a bit claustrophobic, and my girlfriend had to talk me down here. But when we sat in that first cave for a few minutes, I started to calm down, and after that it was so beautiful and exciting that I forgot to be afraid of the narrow bits."
Said Andrew Carelli: ``Wait until I tell my kids. They'll never believe it. What I liked best was that one minute you're in a narrow slot where the stalactites hang down so low they bump your head, and the next you're floating through a cave so big your helmet light won't reach the ceiling."
CHECK-IN
Phone the NZ Tourist Board on 02 9258 9903.
© 2000 Sun Herald