Unusual Excursion Through Cave Includes Wet Suits, Glowworms
It’s a cliche but a good one. Nothing can describe the glowworms on the cave walls and ceiling above the underground river as well as saying they look like constellations of stars.
Yet the Milky Way never looked this bright on its best night, or this massive and close. And no one has viewed the stars while drifting through the blackness in an inner tube on a river 200 feet underground.
Welcome to Black Water Rafting’s uniquely New Zealand adventure, a journey that leaves participants with a feeling of exhilaration and the knowledge that they did something they’ve never dreamed of.
“I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t that,” says Lorraine Daniels, a nurse and grandmother from Lewiston, N.Y., who not only had never been in a cave before, but had never worn a wet suit, never mind leaped 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 native Maori to establish a British-style monarchy during the Maori land wars 150 years ago.
About three hours 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 skyward.
The Maori 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 15 miles. Many are ablaze with the unique glowworms that have drawn tourists for 100 years.
In 1987, some enterprising Kiwis realized, if you put people in wet suits and equipped them with a lighted helmet and an inner tube, they could float and scramble along these underground streams for an adventure the likes of which can 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 $38 U.S.) and a five-hour trip that includes rappelling down cliffs and climbing beside an underground waterfall (about $65 U.S.). Both are marvelous, but the shorter trip, about two hours of it underground, can be made by reasonably fit people of almost any age.
“That was awesome, just awesome,” says Margaret Johnston of Denver, 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 at caves in the States. I never dreamed 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. I didn’t even get scared at that place where you’re sitting in your tube, and the roof comes down so low you have to tip your head back into the water to float under the ceiling.”