This morning we did a tour of the Waitomo Caves. They've been running tours here non-stop for 110 years, and frankly some of the jokes the tour guide told are probably that old. Being a limestone cave it's full of stalactites and stalagmites, although since there hasn't been much rain lately they were much drier than we expected. One large cavern has amazing acoustics, and has hosted concerts by many famous singers including Dame Tiri Te Kanawa (who the guide claims is a Waitomo native but I can't find anything to back that up. Well, not on Wikipedia anyway.)
It's also where the local Carols by Candlelight are apparently held, although they don't need torches because the caves are full of glowworms. We'd seen a couple on the river banks in Rotorua, but nothing compared to here.
After walking down lots of stairs we climbed into boats, and the guide used overhead cables to slowly pull us through while our eyes adjusted. The boats are necessary because most of the glowworms are in the section directly above the river that flows through the caves as that's where their insect food comes from. It was an amazing experience, and yet again Eleanor took what could have been quite scary completely in her stride.
(That isn't us in the image below, but you can't take photos in there and this at least gives you the general idea. Actually it doesn't at all, because there are no worms on the cave walls and they're not all as bright as that and it's quite obviously been photoshopped, but the boat is a bit like ours at least.)
Next it was only a few hundred metres up the road to a stop I've been looking forward to for weeks; a shed where they do a daily demonstration of shearing enormous Angora rabbits, and sell yarn made of the bunnies' fur. It was quite freaky seeing how much the rack they tie them to for shearing resembled a spit roast, but the rabbit didn't seem to mind at all. They are incredibly soft, and I went slightly nuts in the retail bit.
We stopped at the Big Apple (no, not New York, just a really big apple) for lunch, before starting the 3 hour haul up to Auckland, arriving just in time for peak hour. Once a load of washing was on we headed back out to the Sky Tower to watch the sun set from a long way up. Well, that was the plan. The reality was that every street the GPS told us to turn down either wasn't there or was blocked with road works or police or a crane of some other impediment, and that's not including most of them being one way at the best of times.
The tower entry is in the casino, which apparently includes lots of restaurants. The only one we could actually find was a massively overpriced buffet, which although not the best food we've ever eaten at least meant we didn't have to wait for an a la carte option to be cooked, and Eleanor was starting to get a bit cranky. And after all that it was totally dark by the time we'd finished, so we've decided to have another attempt tomorrow night.
Obviously we did eventually get here, but otherwise our attempt to buy nappies on the way home almost ended in a Gilligan's Island-esque tragedy. The GPS gave us a list of local grocery stores, so we picked a supermarket name we recognised and started following orders. The aforementioned problems struck again, and at one point the GPS sent us on a full lap around Auckland University and looked like it was going to do the same to us again. After a few more very strange detours - and hearing Eleanor pipe up with "bugger" from the back seat, much to our bemusement/horror/relief that it wasn't something worse - we finally spotted the welcoming fluorescent glow of our destination, and thankfully it was still open. To put it in context, a 2.1km trip to the supermarket ended up taking 40 minutes. And we thought navigating around Wellington was bad...
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