Caves

Cue your cannily fashionable morning wear - a neoprene body suit with fetching matching jacket, accessorized with a scarlet hard hat, a jazzy black and yellow harness and some funky-as green and black gumboots. (Unless you are Alex, in which case your wear blindingly white wellies. Point and laugh).
Get yourself attached to a cable and then throw yourself off of solid ground and abseil 37metres down a narrow, wet, creamy-white limestone hole. In the dark.
Once safely landing, and realising just how cold it is in a cave, go clambering over shards of spiky limestone. Look around you in wonderment as your headtorch lights up stalactites (down) and stalagmites (up).
Then jump off a ledge, in pitch black, strictly all torches off, attached to a zipwire in a cave filled with glow worms. Exhilarating does not cut it as descriptive enough.
Take a break drinking hot tea and supping on cake, kindly brought down by the guides. Swing your legs over the edge of the ledge, not knowing what is below. Then, once tea is done, grab a giant inflatable tube and launch yourself off again, landing in the water far below with an ear-rending crash.
I kid you not, but this water was cold. It redefined the meaning of the word cold. I have never been so freezing cold.
After hauling ourselves through the water, we stopped and floated, turning off our torches and allowing the current to take us back. It was like floating on a gondola through space. Thousands of twinkly glow worms, blue-green phosphorescent pinpricks of light, adorned the walls of the cave like brilliant constellations.
So much so awe-inspiring however. Next up, we trekked further underground, down narrow tunnels lined with spiky limestone. I am amazed that my hands are only mildly pink, instead of ripped to shreds as I thought they would be.
We leapt over a waterfall, plummeting down several metres and in my case especially, submerging myself so deeply my headtorch went out and left me bobbing around in the dark, swirling water.Luckily, the guide, Lloyd, was on hand to pull me up again.
Crazily enough, we had done so well we were ahead of our time, so our guides took us on an alternate route out of the caves. First, we shimmied along a narrow (half a metre at best) tunnel, using our knees and backs to stay upright. Then, we scurried through a tube-like tunnel, heads down, hands in the mud. We trawled through a cavern where the ceiling became so low, we ended up going along with one eye out of the water and the rest of us completely submerged. Nerve-wracking, to say the least!
At the end of this crazy escapade, we had a choice - the tranquil way out, or the dangerous way out. Obviously, all being of sane disposition, we choose the mad, bad and mental way out.
We climbed our way up two separate waterfalls, water gushing down in a veritable torrent, slippery rocks providing the tiniest of hand and footholds, torches flickering and distorting the light. Finally, there was daylight at the end of the tunnel. We had successfully climbed over 70 metres out of the dark, dank, freezing depths into the light of day. The sense of achievement and satisfaction is unreal.
We have celebrated our success with a massive pub dinner.
That caving trip, was quite simply an awesome experience. Waitomo Caves, and in particular the Black River Rafting Co. were beyond expectation.
Pictures are in the slideshow on Flickr, to the right. Check them out!