umping, and a bit of low energy tubing. The very coolest thing in all this was that there were glow worms on the ceiling!! It was a like a romantic starlit night. Glow worms actually are the larvae stage of a fly and the glowing bit really comes from their poo. They use it to attract food and then hang these fine spit lines down from the ceiling to catch them as they come close to the light...So our guide said we should probably just call them shit glowing maggots or something to that effect. Charming really. Here's me abseiling (bit of an unfortunate picture but gives you the idea) and some of of the caves and our unbelievable time caving.
Sosince we were down in the caves for about five hours (minus the bit of training we did on the surface,) we headed back to the hostel for a respite. Our hostel was in sight distance of the place so we just walked up the hill, dropped our stuff in our room, and headed out for the trampoline and hammock. This is me chilling in the sun shine with Liz's glasses. They cover my whole face so they're pretty sweet glasses if you want to take a nap.
So then post this, we went to this pub called Curly's for dinner. Turned out the food wasn't too fantastic but not really a huge deal after such an amazing day. That night I slept on the
trampoline for a bit watching the most unbelievable sky I have ever seen, and then went to sleep in the hostel where I tried to drown out the snoring of the boys who returned home later than me from Curly's.
Saturday March 1, 2008:
We were up pretty early ready to head out for the day...or moderately ready due to fatigue. The original plan was to head to Raglan, a beach town with black sand beaches for a bit, but since it was raining we thought we might detour around. One of the few roads in the area was closed due to a bridge collapse so we figured out some alternative routes and first happened up on this amazing natural bridge. The tramp up was nice, sprinkled with these weird looking rocks. We later learned they were fossilized clam shells...look at how big that clam must have been! (the pic is along the side) The bridge was even more fantastic... hundreds of feet high and pretty much just unreal. That top portion above the light is all stone if you're confused about where the bridge bit comes in.
So after tramping (NZ for hiking) around there for awhile, we set off again down this incredible motion sickness inducing road where we came upon another fantastic tramping opportunity down to this waterfall. We ended up sliding down this extremely muddy pathway (it was still raining) where we went swimming at the base of the falls. Some of the boys were skinny dipping and Alex F almost had an unfortunate encounter with an eel, which would have been extremely funny had this eel (which was pretty big) been braver. Alex screamed like a little girl just for the record.
After this, we headed back down the road to some caves we had seen. Another short tramp and we were inside this gigantic cavernous hole. It instantly got freezing in the opening, but unfortunately we couldn't go in very far. Just a short staircase down.
Afterwards, we hit up a pretty water fall called Bridal Veil Falls for a short tramp and a good view. It seems pretty obvious why it got the name.
Our final adventure took us all the way back down that same winding road (I was driving and I was getting a headache from all the twisting) to our original beach destination, Raglan. This black sand beach was beautiful even in the grayness of the day. We have all sorts of crazy photos and videos here of us running around, taking jumping photos, and chasing these tumble weed type deals that kept rolling by.
We spent a good long time here just bumming around before eating dinner at a local restaurant. Nothing too exciting about dinner except just after we arrived this huge siren went off (sounded like a tornado warning.) We were all looking around wondering what was going on when we see this guy running down the street and others just standing looking out their doors. Turns out it was just the call for the volunteer fire fighters but we were wondering why everyone wasn't seeking safe ground at first since it was storming pretty hard. We headed home after dinner in our blue minivan. I felt like a soccer mom driving that around with everyone in the back. We hit Auckland around 11:30, and it felt so nice to crawl into bed. This blissful rest was unfortunately cut short by the bell tower just outside my window which decided it would be fun to toll on sunday morning for a good 10-15 minutes. I'm going to look into disabling it.
Start classes tomorrow...it's been awhile, wonder how that's going to go?
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