Queen's Birthday Special: Part 2

The road trip rolls on as we gave up on New Plymouth due to weather mishaps and headed over to waitomo for some underground fashion, stricktily in the kiwi sense!

Waitomo Caves and the Lost world Highway

We decided to take the scenic route to Waitomo, through route 43, aka the Lost World Highway. And to be honest, the route certainly lived up to its name.
With sights of the New Zealand landscape as I expected, with hills, sheep and awesome views. We stopped off at random points in the road, cos we could not bear to drive past such cool places without fullfilling every tourists' duty:




We stayed the night at a really cool backpackers (with electricity and everything, so quite a luxury!)
The day after we set off to explore the Waitomo caves. Waitomo is a limestone-rich landscape which has been heavily worn down by the rain and has developped an intricate system of caves, which are exploted fully by the tourist industry in kiwiland.

This seems like a good point to bring up the fact the Nz is heavy on extreme sports, this is the home of skydiving, bungee jumping and rockclimbing. In an attempt to work out why, we came up with two possible reasons: either because NZ is so far away from other countries that the people here have had to work out alternative ways to spend their holidays, or simply, they are nuts.

Excuse my digression, but it just seems necessary to point this out. Cos the Waitomo caves, rather than a simle walk through the caves have been developped into an over the top adventure playground, where you can abseil into the caves, go tubing through the river and then climb your way back out!
Feeling brave, we went tubing thought the caves, and it was pretty awesome! The caves are dotted with "gloworms" (a fancy name for glow in the dark maggots) which do make the view pretty cool (no pix, I'm afraid, no chance of getting the camera there and back!).

Afterwards we went tramping (hehe, the new zealand term for hiking, hehe, we went for a bit of a tramp, lol) around the general waitomo area and the views were pretty cool as well (tho excuse the slight shaking of the camera, going caving can be COLD!)




So that, in a nushell was my weekend, pretty cool, wish it were longer- but alas, there's blood splashing to be done and it might as well be me doing it! (note to self: must stip bringing up creepy forensics updates).