I was excited about breakfast cause our bnb had a teapot, but then we slept in a bit so only had time for one cup, as we had a couple more Waitomo Caves excursions this morning, the first (Waitomo Glowworm Cave) starting at 9:30am.
We had checked in yesterday and already had our tickets, so just made our way to the waiting area, in the main admin building.
The glowworm excursion was much more organized than yesterday’s Aranui Cave tour. There’s a tour with 16 people that starts every ten minutes and the guides showed up on the dot.
At 9:30:00 our guide welcomed all the 9:30 tour people, and scanned our tickets on entry. First thing was a bunch of green screen pics. Photography isn’t allowed in the glowworm cave so they photoshop you in pics you can buy later.
There’s a short walk through some stalagmites and stalactites, similar to yesterday’s Aranui cave. It also got progressively dimmer in the cave to make the glowworms more visible.
We all boarded a boat and then the guide pulled us through the caves in the dark using an overhead rope system.
We entered the first cave, with an impressive clustering of glowworms, about 15’ x 15’, about 20’ above us. It was larger than any cluster we’d seen in Te Anau Glowworm Caves, although those were much closer overhead.
We circled underneath the glowworms for about five minutes, before continuing on. That however was it for the tour. That’s when I noticed the tour is called ‘Waitomo Glowworm Cave’, with a singular cave. Te Anau had a series of caves with glowworms and I had figured this would be the same.
It only took 45 minutes for the whole tour so we had time to check out the gift shop before driving over to the Ruakuri Cave. Its entrance is close to the Aranui Cave.
This was also pretty structured. They had a limit of 16 people, and asked for our names to check in (so we didn’t need to show our ticket). There was a constant stream of walk-ins trying to buy tickets, only to be put on a waiting list. I think it’s just to make them feel better as there’s hardly any no-shows.
Our guide met us at exactly 11am and we walked about five minutes to the entrance. Our guide was good, the best of the three excursions we had here. We entered the long spiral walkway down 45m to cave proper. Once in we were completely in the dark, to help our eyes adjust.
At the bottom, we passed through a series of airlocks, like we were in a James Bond movie. Our guide explained the airlocks were to maintain the airflow as nature had designed. They had learned from other cave systems in the world, where entrances built for tourism caused subtle changes in cave life from airflow that were only noticed over years.
These caves were the same age geologically as Aranui, but much more extensive and a far better experience with the smaller group. It’s a 90 minute loop that returns back to the spiral walkway. As a bonus, you can also see glowworms! In fact we felt the glowworm experience was better here in Ruakuri than on the Glowworm Cave tour.
Overall if you only have the opportunity to do one of the Waitomo Cave experiences, I'd definitely recommend the Ruakuri Cave tour.
And that was it for our day. It was still drizzling (it’s been miserable since we got to Te Kuiti). Which I guess as we had been touristing in caves didn’t matter that much.
We spent the afternoon at our bnb, catching up on reading, laundry, and our travel blog posts. We checked out the green screen pics from earlier in the day, we looked photoshopped in. We had grilled lamb and a Greek salad for dinner which all turned out rather well.
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