The caves of Waitomo, an extensive network of 80 different caverns located under a small town on New Zealand’s North Island, were first explored in 1887 by a tribal chief of Maori peoples native to the area and an English surveyor. The two pioneers glided through the pitch-black caves on small rafts lit only by candles, marveling at ancient limestone formations until they found themselves floating beneath a spectacular display that would later come to be one of New Zealand’s most unique ecological attractions: hundreds of tiny worms emitting blue light clung to the cave ceilings above them. The Glowworm Grotto of Waitomo caves had been discovered.
Of course, New Zealand has its share of world-renowned geographic attractions — the sizeable Moeraki boulders, almost perfectly spherical stones clustered along the Otago coast, and the famous “pancake rocks” resembling teetering stacks of hotcakes scattered along Punakaiki shores on the South Island, but Waitomo’s caves are the crowning gems of the collection.
As a result, Waitomo has become a major tourist destination. Guides show visitors the best of the caverns using a variety of methods, from walking tours to boat trips. Perhaps the most popular way to explore Waitomo in the tradition of New Zealand adventure sports is black water rafting, in which guides lead participants through the black abyss of the caves on floating inner tubes.
Black water rafting in the Waitomo glowworm caves wasn’t something I was going to miss while studying abroad in New Zealand.
While driving to Waitomo for a day trip earlier this week, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I remembered my first experience visiting a cave on a third grade field trip to the Tuckaleechee Caverns beneath East Tennessee’s Smokey Mountains as part of our unit on bats. I also reminisced about a trip to Europe in high school when I had ventured into Slovenia’s grand Postojna Cave. A train carried our group deep underground, where we were awe-stricken by magnificent rock formations and the ghost-like amphibian creatures indigenous to the cave known as olms, once thought to be baby dragons brought to the surface of the cave by rising waters.
I had an understanding of caves and the bizarre creatures lurking within them, but no amount of knowledge could have prepared me for my guided black water rafting adventure into the Waitomo caves.
The first part was the hardest: squeezing clumsily into a damp wetsuit. Along with the 11 other travelers on the tour, I was given a helmet with a headlamp and a goofy-looking pair of rubber boots. We were then shuttled to the caves, where our guides provided us with some background information. The caves were formed over 30 million years ago when Waitomo was under water as shell fragments and sediment was tightly compacted over time into thick layers of limestone. As tectonic plates beneath the earth’s surface gradually shifted, the limestone was thrust above sea level, and cracks in the limestone began to forge channels of water. In fact, Waitomo translates to “waterhole” in the native Maori language of Te Reo.
As the dozen of us packed into the entrance of Waitomo’s Ruakuri Cave, I realized how truly dark it was inside. Once past the opening of the cave, our journey was lit only by our headlamps and the glowworms we would later encounter. The ceilings of the cave were low, decked with stalactites created by limestone crystal deposits left behind by dripping water. We cautiously walked, waded and crawled through murky waters in a single-file line, awkwardly navigating the uneven rocks of the cave floor carrying our cumbersome inflatable tubes.
Along the way, we jumped off two small waterfalls with the help of our guides. Poising at the edge of the cascades, I blindly bounced backwards, ungracefully splashing into my inner tube. We then linked our tubes by holding onto one another’s feet, snaking through the cave in a line as we were pulled by one of our guides.
At last, we reached the Glowworm Grotto of the cave. The worms are the larva stage of a species of fly unique to New Zealand that uses bioluminescence to catch other small insects for food, our guides told us. They attach themselves to the roof of the cave using tube-shaped nests constructed of silk.
I laid back in my tube and turned off my headlamp, gazing above to the glowworms casting dim bioluminescent rays from clusters on the cave ceiling into the dark waters below like tiny azure stars beaming down from the sky. As our guides informed us that we would soon reach the end of our journey and emerge into the Waitomo forests, I wondered how many other of the world’s fascinating rarities are often unseen by human eyes because they lie deep beneath the surface.
