Glow Worm Caves

Pooped after the drive

We took a trip to the Waitomo glow worm caves a few weekends ago.  The scenic, three hour drive took us to new territory north of New Plymouth.  We're coming to grips a bit with the isolation of the Taranaki region.  Taranaki is a bump on the west coast of the north island separated from the rest of the island by a national park and a volcano.  There are plenty of things to do nearby and Wellington is within easy reach, but parts north and east are difficult to get to.  Going north from New Plymouth on State Highway 3 takes you through two small tunnels, one of which is a single lane.  There are a couple pretty little towns beyond the passes.  Piopio is near a filming location for the first Hobbit film and Te Kuiti is in a broad valley with a nice looking Aero club.

The trip to the cave took some steam out of us as can be seen, but we perked up for the tour.  I've been on a number of commercial cave tours and Ruakuri cave is one of the best.  The original cave entrance was closed a few years ago due to a Maori cultural concern and a new entrance was built.  The new entrance is a vertical cylinder 10m in diameter and about 30m deep.  You spiral down to the cave on a ramp built on the inside of the cylinder.  The tour route was also rebuilt while the entrance was constructed and well was drilled from the surface into the cave to pass concrete and other moisture sensitive materials down to the workers.  They left the well casing sticking out of the cave ceiling and I took a photo looking up through the casing.

Worms!

Sunlight down the casing

Glow worm lines

The signature element of the cave is the glow worms.  Both Laura and I got a start as the tour guide described the worms.  She opened with "Now that we're beyond the point of no refund, I can share with you the secret of the worms that we don't advertise."  Laura and I both thought the next words were going to be, "They're FAKE!". Not so however.  The worms are actually the larval stage of a fly so a better term would be glow maggots.  They have an interesting life cycle.  They attract insects that blunder into the cave with their tiny light and trap them with a single sticky line that they dangle down from the ceiling of the cave.  I tried to get photos to showing both the lights and their lines.

A couple of tour companies operate in the Waitomo area.  One company has an underground rafting tour that sounds a little spooky.  You get a wet suit, an inner tube and a helmet and they send you off into the blackness on an underground river.  We didn't consider taking this tour.

After the tour, we headed back home and stopped by the Hobbit filming location in Piopio.  The tours were done for the day, but we chatted with the land owners and took a few shots of the landscape.

Hobbit Landscape