Use these navigation links to move between the Year 2025 pages.  Specific pages can be accessed at the bottom of this page

January 2025 (Part 05)

New Zealand Trip - Day Four: Aukland to Waitomo to Rotorua

Adventures By Disney - Day Three: On The Glow

A beautiful day at the Aukland harbor.  But, time to go.  Passed an interesting Maori Marae, or community house, on the way and a couple other interesting buildings.

We had about a three-hour bus ride to Waitomo, which is south of Aukland along the western coast.  Some fun tightly curved roads toward the end, as he got into the hills.  We stopped at Roseland's Resort, enjoying a barbeque lunch and the wildflowers.

Some mandatory pictures of bees to send to Alexa.

We were headed to a tour of a cave with Glow Worms.  We loaded up into a smaller bus to get to the top of a nearby hill, then had a small walk down to the cave with our guide Mark.

We reached a small cave with a stream heading in.  Mark explained the stream fed an underground lake and traveled underground for miles before re-emerging.

Glad to see there was another entrance hidden behind the tree on the right which allowed us to access the cave without wading through the stream.  We were headed into Te Anna O Te Atua or the "Spirit Cave" which was well known to the Maori.  Mark told us the story of how the Maori first led Dr Thompson into the cave on a quest to find bones of giant extinct birds.

There were a couple openings, which let in some bugs.  Near the bottom we found a pretty interesting cave spider (yea, didn't need that pointed out).

Our guide also pointed out the bones of a Moa (a now extinct 12 foot tall, wingless bird) which died in the cave a couple thousand years ago.

There was a poster outside the cave showing what a moa and moa skeleton would have looked like, along with a map of the cave system.

Hard to get a reasonable picture of the glow worms.  These weren't actually worms, but fungal gnat larva.  In their larval stage, they generate blue-green light to attract prey and product dozens of sticky web-like threads which hang down to catch any prey flying by.  These webs led to their name of Arachnocampa luminosa.  According to Mark, they are predatory and will eat each other, so they each wind up staking out a small territory allowing them to become somewhat evenly distributed in some areas.  They may spend a year as larva, then pupate and emerge as adults, only living for 3 to 4 days.

Mark helped set up a picture with Tiffany to show some of this a bit better by using a flashlight to illuminate our faces while leaving the cave behind us in darkness.

We also loaded into a small boat, which Mark ferried along fixed ropes so we could explore farther into the cave along the lake which stretched across the entire cave for quite a while.

Once we got outside, Mark led us down to the stream which fed into the cave, running underground there for a long way.  As with most streams in New Zealand, there were a number of eels nearby.  They must have been habituated to him, as he brought food and two were there basically waiting for him.  He gave several of us who were willing (including all three of us) an opportunity to feed them.

Here is Tiffany, who was a bit skittish about feeding them.

After some tea, we loaded up on the bus for the two-hour drive to Rotorua, which is on the shore of a pretty lake in the middle of the North Island.  After checking into our hotel, we had free time for the evening, so wandered to nearby Kuirau Park which we saw on the drive in.  This had some wonderful flowers and a number of hot springs and pools (with appropriate warnings not to go in the water with the exception of one small pool which was a lower temperature).  Had to laugh at the view from our room of a car park, a bit different than the view in Aukland.

We wandered back along the lake and through a wonderful community park with one of the better play-grounds we've encountered stretching a long way with many different sections.  There was also an amazing Maori waka (canoe).

        .

We enjoyed a relaxed dinner at an Italian restaurant in a nearby pedestrian area along the lakeshore.