Glowing caves, black sands, and a festival of light.

We farewelled our teeny roadside motel in Cambridge - stocking up on caffeine before pointing our newly-recharged mobile wifi at Waitomo Caves. It got fairly creative, taking us down backstreets of small villages and cutting through farming lanes - but we eventually got close enough to Waitomo that road signs almost begrudgingly appeared.

We stopped at the Information Centre just prior to the caves briefly, mainly to re-visit the small park across the road (where we had stopped just shy of a decade before). The enormous steel slide that defied sensible safety standards was gone - but the timber benches were still there.

Steel slide no more.

2020

2010

I'd got myself sorted with low-light photography prior to arriving - but it turned out all photography is now banned within the caves. The benefits of this is that I didn't inadvertently wander off into a vertical shaft into the depths below in the search of a piccie.

We arrived about 90 seconds too late for the 10am tour, so got to take a seat and watch a number of coach-loads of greying tourists trundle past, before we set off with our tour guide Cory. It turned out that Cory had an awesome sense of humour (at one point implying the roof was over-due for a collapse - you had to be there). He also effortlessly broke into a soulful rendition of Pokarekare Ana - just to demonstrate the acoustics of the suitably named Cathedral room (complete with pipe-organ shaped limestone formations).

Totally not a postcard we bought.

While the formations within the cave were impressive (30,000 year old stalactite - no big deal), the main event was always going to be the glow worms (Arachnocampa luminosa - embarrassingly reminiscent of a Hogwart's spell if you ask me). We worked our way further down into the cave system, before boarding a boat in near complete darkness. Cory propelled us along with a series of cables, and we drifted through a cavernous room roofed by what appeared to be the night's sky in complete silence. We re-emerged into daylight, and after Jen and I took a 15 minute walk to a nearby lookout (of a cow paddock as it turned out), we set off once again - this time to the south west.

Disembarking from our underground river boat.

Passing through some fairly Australian-looking landscape (aside from more tree-ferns and Lord of the Rings type boulders of course), we stopped at the small town of Te Kuiti - billing itself as the shearing capital of the world. Big call if you ask me. They made decent sandwiches and pastries if that counts for anything.

From here to the coast on old State Highway 3 (inclusive of enormous tractors just cruising along to the next township), things took a more tortuous path - the road weaving through near vertical valleys, festooned with tree ferns. After the first half-dozen rock-slide road-signs, we became accustomed to them. Our first glimpse of the west coast came as a bit of the shock as the shore was lined with jet black sand (due to a mix of volcanic sand and iron oxide apparently).

Jen was keen to take a look at some rock formations on the way to New Plymouth (our destination for the next couple of nights), known as the Elephant Rock and The Three Sisters. We tentatively turned across traffic (the lack of a turning lane in a 100 km/hr zone heavily frequented by down-hill semi's woke me up nicely), and out to the parking area. The way out to that stretch of beach is only accessible at low tide (and up to two hours either side of this). We were completely oblivious to this, and attempted to wade out, before giving the water a half-hour to recede.

This stretch of coast is entirely untamed, and it's not hard to imagine that this shoreline would be largely unchanged for a century or more. Unchanged aside from the Elephant Rock having lost its head some time in 2016 - whoops. Two of the 3 sisters were still there (no, I don't know where the third one went to), along with a fairly sizeable rock with a number of ocean-carved tunnels through it.

Skipping stones not a bad way to pass the time.

Success!

Not an elephant - but pretty cool regardless.

Two sisters and a headless elephant on the left in the distance.

We arrived safely (despite the imaginative driving of some locals) at New Plymouth, and found not only the city centre streets, but our hotel reception - entirely deserted (it was after 4pm on a Saturday after all). We eventually managed to get access to our rooms, and then contemplated heading out again to check out Pukekura Park. Our stay at New Plymouth coincided with the Festival of Lights - which is a big deal in this part of New Zealand.

The sun is quite reluctant to actually go down in New Zealand, so we arrived way too early to actually see the lights. We took a quick look around the park in daylight, when we were set upon by a young girl in gum boots doing a fair impression of a chicken scratching in the dirt. Her raking of the gravel/dust with her booted feet became ever-more furious - sending flumes of the stuff into the air and in our direction specifically. It became apparent that parental intervention was not going to be forthcoming, so I (checking left and right - in a clearly guilty manner) sent a small cloud of dust back. The malevolent kicker of earth was no more - scampering off to rejoin her family/flock/brood.

In an unrelated turn of events - we set off to find the food carts, and then checked out the shoreline in what we thought would include the sun setting over the water (being on the west coast and all). Not so much, the coastline at New Plymouth faces north. We returned to Pukekura Park, our convenient parking space now long gone - although we now had the chance of exploring several more blocks of New Plymouth than we would have otherwise...

The place was packed, and this is a festival that has been on every night since the 14th of December.

After a fairly extensive wander around the park, we called it a night, and made our way back to our car (several suburbs away) - I could almost hear our Fitbits weeping.