WAITOMO CAVES

For our last few days in New Zealand, we decided to live adventurously. We booked the cargo plane at the Woodlyn Park Hotel. For two very unusual nights, we stayed in a refurbished 1950s Bristol Freighter aircraft that was used as a transport plane during the Vietnam War, making it one of the last Allied planes to leave the region. We reserved the ever-popular cockpit unit with its unique design and original pilot seats. It was a stay we will always treasure. That said, we wouldn’t do it again. It was one of those travel experiences where you’re glad you tried it, but once is more than enough.

The Woodlyn Park Motel also features a Hobbit house (2 rooms), a railroad car (1 room), a Navy patrol boat named “Waitanic” (5 rooms), and said transport plane (2 rooms). It was voted one of the Top 10 Most Unique Tourism Locations in the world and won the World Innovation Award.

Only five minutes from our plane were the spectacular Waitomo Caves where we took a two-hour tour for $40, exploring the eerie underground cave system where glow worms cling precariously to the limestone ceiling of the caves like little stars and black water river runners scream and laugh their way along the shallow Ruakuri River in the pitch black dark inside inner tubes.

Glowworms are about an inch long. They spin thread through their abdomen like a spider and build hammocks attached to the cave ceilings that they hang in while they catch their food by ingeniously dangling a single thread underneath their beds, fishing for bugs with their sticky net traps. The tiny bugs that hatch in the river flowing through the cave are attracted to the bioluminescent worms, which they mistake for the night sky. They fly toward the lights and get snagged in the nets, which the glow worms reel in for a tasty dinner. The digested bugs are the secret sauce that produces the glow, so the enchanting light is essentially glow poop. After a year of hanging out and snagging bugs, the glow worms grow into much larger worms with no mouth, only reproductive organs. They can’t eat, so they just have sex for two days straight, and then they die of starvation. But not before the female squirts out around 200 baby glowworms. And the cycle begins anew.

The name “Waitomo” comes from the Māori words wai, water, and tomo, hole or shaft. The local Māori people had known about the caves for about a century before a local Māori, Chief Tane, showed it to a couple of English surveyors who started exploring the cave system in 1887 by candlelight on a raft, floating into the cave where the stream goes underground (now the cave’s tourist exit.) As they began their journey, they came across the Glowworm Grotto and were amazed by the twinkling lights coming from the ceiling. They had no idea what they were looking at. They subsequently discovered the upper-level entrance to the cave, which is now the current entrance.

By 1889, the Chief and his wife Huti had opened the cave to visitors and were leading groups on tours for a small fee. About 500 tourists visited the cave in the first two years, and the government soon became concerned about graffiti and vandalism. Their attempts to buy the caves were rebuffed. So, in 1906, the government seized the property under the Scenery Preservation Act. They gave the chief a measly £625. And they started running the caves as a commercial operation.

Enter James Holden, the adjacent landowner, who opened up his own private cave entrance and started offering tours into the Ruakuri cave system, only to be told by the government to cease and desist because his caves were on government land. A subsequent survey, however, revealed that Holden actually owned eighty percent of the cave network, and the government was suddenly out of the cave tour business.

But then the local Māori objected to Holden’s cave entrance because that’s where the local tribe had been burying their dead, including Chief Tane. Bones had been vandalized, and soon, all hell broke loose.

Holden was going to have to dig another entrance, and in order to do so, he was going to need a partner with deep pockets. And all of infrastructure, like the metal catwalks, the CO2 monitors, and a zillion lights lights, all had to be dropped through a narrow tube from above and then assembled in the dark.

In 1996, Holden’s grandson cut a deal with a large conglomerate called Tourism Holdings Limited (THL), a local river running company called Black Water Rafting, which was running rafts through the caves, and the former Māori owners. THL dumped about $4 million into boring a new spiral entrance, installing handicap accessible ramps, special lights, CO2 monitoring equipment, and countless other amenities. And in the spirit of reconciliation, many of the descendants of Chief Tane and Huti now manage and work at the caves and receive a percentage of the cave’s revenue through the 1990 Waitomo Deed of Settlement.

So, the story has a happy ending, I guess.

Major features of the Ruakuri Cave tour include: Holdens Cavern, named after the original owner; The Drum Passage; The Pretties; and The Ghost Passage.

To be honest, the Waitomo Caves are really no different than Luray or Carlsbad Caverns, except for those crazy glowworms. And who doesn’t like a good glow worm?

After getting our good glow on, we walked out into the blinding sunlight and headed downstream to the nearby Ruakuri Walk, a scenic 4-mile switchback loop around Waitomo’s forested limestone gorge. The winding jungle trail led us under shiny marble arches, through the Ruakuri Natural Tunnel, inside the entrance to Aranui Cave, across bridges over rushing creeks, and culminated on a ridgetop with tingly views of the surrounding countryside. It was a steep and strenuous hike through yet another tropical paradise, and there were lots of confusing sidetrails. But I still liked it more than a claustrophobic cave filled with glowing worms.

Then it was back to our favorite eatery in town, the Huhu Cafe, where we dined out on the jungle patio, eating gourmet pizza made with locally sourced meats and veggies and crowned with a few frosty Speight’s Gold Medal Ales (1876). The food and drink in New Zealand are outstanding!

By the time we got back to our airplane motel, the sun was setting, the Waitomo Valley was glowing with cathedral light, and the birds and barnyard animals were raging against the coming of the night.