Touch ground when it thunders

Waitomo / Cathedral Cove

As it turns out it's easier to post email's home from Asia than from NZ. Many of the places we're stopping in don't have internet connections and when they do they're dial up so this page takes about 10 min to load, etc. NZ is a small sparcely populated place, the Driver keeps saying things like, "We're coming into a a rather large city city now of, oh about 50,000 . . ." 3.9 million people in the whole country and 1.4 of them live in Auckland. The south island is supposed to be even less populated, I can't wait. I should be there within the next 4-5 days.

It also turns out that I'm not claustrophobic, I always thought I was. So on Wed I decided to go spelunking, or "caving" as they call it here in NZ. (they, in general use the language better than we do. They "have a shower" they don't take one. They fill forms in, not out, etc.) The Waitomom caves are not to be missed according to everyone so I signed on for some underwater white (black) water rafting in an inner tube. They took us out to a Quonset hut in the middle of a sheep field and put us (myself and 3 others) into 10mm wetsuits and galoshes and then we marched across the field-o-sheep (who stare at you as you go by, all of them at once)to a ladder descending 30' or so through a very small hole. At the bottom our guide said "well you've all passed the claustrophobia test. Now crawl through there." An even smaller hole. At one point the hole he wanted me to go through was so small I got stuck and had to back track. This illicited a minor internal claustrophobic crisis, but all's well. For the next 2.5 to 3 hours he lead us through a maze of caves and water pools. Oh helmets, we're all wearing miner's helmets with the light in the front, black 10mm suits and white galoshes. I kept whacking my head on things, good thing for the helmet. We swam through pools and climbed around stalagmites and a crawled/floated through exceedingly small spaces. We stopped and turned off our headlamps to look at the glow worms (shagging canabalistic toxic shit maggots, I'll explain that to whomever when I get back). Our guide, Brad, warned us to not twiddle our fingers in the water or the eels would bite us, oh and not to bleed if at all possible so they dont' go into a frenzy. We walked around looking for eels, and found one. I know this sounds a bit scary but it wasn't, at all. No rafting, no fast water, didn't do any of the things described in the brocure. Maybe we accidentally got taken on a different trip, who knows. It was fantastic, one of the best things I've ever done.

After the caving they drove us to a fancy beach town where we stayed in un fancy dorms and got up early to walk to Cathedral Cove. Kiwi's use the word "walk" where we would use, oh say "outdoor excursion." The walk to Cathedral Cove was 3 miles or so up hill for 2. A great and unexpected morning workout. Picture a perfect light sand beach in your head surrounded by tan cliffs and sub tropical flora. That's Cathedral Cove. There wasn't anyone else there, which keeps happening and I'm always surprised. This country feels untouched in a way I didn't think still existed. The DOC (department of conservation) is in charge of conserving 1/3 of the country and they do a hell of a job. When we reserve land and wildlife in the states it usually means you aren't allowed to hunt/log/mine on it. In NZ it means you can't alter it at all, you can't take a shell off the beach. It's fantastic. They're an outdoor oriented people, to a huge degree. I can't tell you how much time I've spent listening to them, all of them, talk about the trees. They love their trees. I'm going to post this, as I'm sure it will take a while to go through.

The next post will be about the Haka, followed by one about all the Cockney slang I've been learning from my friend Sam. Thanks for all the emails and comments. Oh and Lance, thanks for everything bro. Amazing place you have here.

Go Sox!

posted by jts @ 2:23 PM