Tag Archives: waitomo

Waitomo

One place we visited that had nothing to do with volcanoes was Waitomo Caves. The caves were set in dense rainforest, and is famous for their glow worms. I have been to some of these caves before but since then they have opened up some new caves – we were able to visit three of them.

Waitomo Caves

Waitomo Caves

They weren’t the biggest caves I had ever seen, but they did have some lovely details.

Waitomo Caves

Waitomo Caves

Waitomo Caves

One of them you descend into by a giant corkscrew ramp, and had suspended walkways to keep you above the wet floor. Now that’s engineering.

Waitomo Caves

Waitomo Caves

The Kiwis are good like that, very creative, out of the box thinkers, and you see evidence of it everywhere. Sorry to say, but often Aussies seem like square pegs in comparison.

Waitomo Caves

Well, we’ve come to the end of our geological tour of NZ, and all the travel posts too. I’ll be posting about things much closer to home from now on, which isn’t all bad, because 4 months of travelling was very exhausting.

The Forgotten Highway – Waitomo

I’m starting a new sequence of posts today about one journey I took through New Zealand back in 2004. Yes, there’s certainly a wealth of photos from that trip (as with all my trips to NZ), simply because it’s such a stunning country to photograph.

This journey was in the west of the North Island, from Waitomo to New Plymouth. Waitomo is famous for its extensive cave system, many of which contain glow worms. Seriously, you’ve never seen glow worm caves like these before, because they are large, and they are very, very wet.

Access is via a number of means. The more adventurous go caving, which includes abseiling 20 or so metres into an abyss, or white water rafting. I went via the most placid form, on an aluminium boat, but the caves were still spectacular.

Of course, it’s almost impossible to take photos of glow worms, but here is one of the tributaries of the Waitomo River that runs through the caves, which made just as pretty a picture.

Ruakuri Walk