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Thursday, 27 April 2017

Caves And Volcanoes

Waitomo - home to glow worm caves and possibly Hobbits

I’ll cut to the chase here: we visited two caves in Waitomo where we saw glow worms. If you don’t know what they are, then the name is a bit of a give-away. But they’re actually larvae that cling to the cave ceilings, and are bio-luminescent so as to attract prey. It’s only their livers that are glowing though, but in the pitch black of a cave, it makes no difference. As we cruised up and down a cave river in total darkness, we may as well have been looking at a constellation of stars overhead. It was quite otherworldly. 

Doing our best not to think of The Descent

The first cave was a wet cave, and as I felt the odd drip of water, I prayed that’s all it was as I had spotted some ceiling-based molluscs with my headlight when the tour operator guided us towards the boats. The second cave was a dry cave, and included several man-made lights inside. As we walked through, we saw some glow worms, though nowhere near as impressive as the first cave. There are also the remnants of animals in here from goats to cows who were unfortunate enough to fall through holes in the earth above (hence the name Waitomo, which means “Water Hole”). There is also a fossil of a now-extinct giant bird known as a Moa, once indigenous to the area.

Dry cave (so no alcohol)

Outside these caves, the landscape is simply gorgeous. But perhaps a better way to describe it would be “Shire-esque.” The undulating land is a lush green – strangely almost fluorescent compared to the grass I’m used to seeing back in the UK – and great mountain ranges line the horizon (see the next post as we visited them too). And while the filmmakers behind The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies ultimately decided to shoot elsewhere, the sound of water dripping in the caves we visited were indeed used in The Hobbit films.

Forget Wally - where's Bilbo?

Before settling in Rotorua for the night, we enjoyed a cultural experience on the ground of a historic Maori village, led by a local Maori guide. Here, we participated in “Powhiri”, a welcoming ceremony that involves hand-to-eye coordination games using sticks, and we learned about the history of the village (Marae) and the Rotorua area. The area is also teeming - or steaming - with geothermal energy which the locals use for cooking, heating and communal bath houses. You can smell the sulphur in the air here, and I was told that the whole area, being sat on an active volcano, is a “time bomb.”

Just a casual game involving throwing sticks at one another

On yet another film-related note, the local Maori guide has a rather extensive (for lack of a better word) family of tens of thousands, which just happens to include the actor Temuera Morrison who voiced Moana’s father (in the film Moana), who is his relative through marriage!

My first claim to fame in New Zealand

As I said in my Auckland post, with regards to film locations, it’s not all Mount Doom-and-gloom. But the next post is…

Mount Doom...

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