NZ16-8: Mar 6th~Waitomo Lost World Epic

I spend hours underground and enjoy a great BBQ

Like I said, Stephanie had told me the Lost World Epic was The best experience in Waitomo, so, after waking before the alarm, cooking my porridge, and sticking the camera on for a final charge, I set off  down the road before 0930 to check-in.

The notice board at the office (I think)

There were 8 of us booked in for the Epic that day, & I jotted their names down on a bit of scrap.

They were John from the US, Roberto from Switzerland, Jessica - another Brit, a Dutch couple Rik & Corrinna (possibly?), & Sophia & Georgia from the States. One of the girls was with Rik, but I don't know which at this late stage, & having known a Dutch Corrina before, I'm taking a punch I've recalled correctly?
Jessica & John were staying in Juno, & my notes suggest the 2 American girls were climbers who had a campervan.
But then, it is 2 years ago, I can't actually remember, & my hieroglyphics are giving the usual problems ;-p
Our guides for the day were Brad & Nathan, & while I didn't write down where they came from, I suspect they were Kiwis?

Off come the flip-flops, & on go the white wellies

After doing the MedForms to say we were all healthy etc, all 10 of us piled into a mini-bus & drove for about 20 minutes into the bush where there was a hut containing kit for us to change into, showers & possibly lockers??

I'm not sure on the lockers, but as we couldn't take our cameras underground, & money wouldn't be needed, I'm guessing there were.

John fiddling with his harness. My notes say
the wellies came from a meat factory.  Err??
At least, that's what the scrawl looks like!

Brad & Nathan sorted us all out with wetsuits, harnesses, wellies & hard-hats, & gave us all instructions how they should all fit before checking our harnesses were nice & neat.
We also had a practice at hooking our carabiners on & off, & "other safety stuff": at least that's what my hieroglyphics say!

Various peeps get ready to go underground.
I think Nathan may be showing us how the hats must fit?

The pic below is my last pic of the morning.

We get a brief from Brad

All the following photos were taken by Brad & Nathan, & I have just saved them for this blog from DropBox - my 1st attempt at something techy!

This looks like we went up before we went down!

Not having a clue about where we actually were, I Emailed Waitomo Adventures, & Brad ~ see pic above, got back with this info:
We were in the Mangapu River. Mangapu meaning ‘plentiful.’ The cave system is also known as the Mangapu Cave system. We just enter via the Lost World hole.
Cheers Brad :-D

We approach the drop-zone

John & I hook up before we drop out

I've also no idea how long we walked, but it didn't matter, the bush sights & sounds were awesome :-)  & we headed into the bush, black penguins in white wellies!





Once we got to the hole in the ground, Brad & Nathan split us up into 2s for the abseil down.

I was with John.

The drop

If you read the blurb from the Waitomo Adventures website you'll see we would abseil 100m.
That's 338 feet.

Pic courtesy of Ebay

Me sideways on before the drop into the hole
Note the fetching white wellies ;-)

Blackpool Tower is 518 feet high, so we would drop over half its height.

These are not lift-cables!

Me. Pretending to be cool
Actually, I was, & I'd do it again tomorrow if I could :-D

The guides had us all pause while they took pics of us near the top where it was still light enough to see faces.

I think this is Sophia & Georgia

Sun above, cavern below

I didn't write the order of descent, but there was a great pic of a few of us abseiling down into the dark.

Brad or Nathan must've whizzed down ahead of us & took a great atmospheric photo.

Descending into darkness

We look like the SAS or something ;-) 

Where we'd come from, with a hand for perspective

Lunch in the light

Once we were all safely down, it was time for an early lunch which Brad & Nathan had carried down for us.


My notes say: 
"Beef salad butty, 2x home-made cakes & a choice of T/coff/HC" and:
"I had 1.5 HC* to avoid loo stops & getting out of wet-suit" * = Hot Chocolate  :-q   Yum.

Me being daft & in hidari shuto
My stance could've been a bit lower ;-)

Then we all posed for pics before leaving the sunshine behind for a while.

The 1st wildlife we encountered was this eel .  .  .

Near where we'd been sat for lunch, there was a pool with an eel in it.

I vaguely remember stroking it & thinking it was really smooth. 

But maybe that was wishful thinking?

Unless it was another eel I am remembering?

Who was very friendly & came to see us

While writing this, I got in touch with Waitomo Adventures, & have been swapping Es with Brad who's come up with some great info.

I asked him about the eel, & he said it was a NZ Long-finned eel.

So now I know :-)

Brad also explained that the pic below was one of us all squatting to look at the eel.

Brad says we were eel watching at this point.
A tad different to whale watching ;-p

Brad said:
This photo was taken just after we got into the water. (In sequential order after the posing individual silhouette shot) I’ll be playing with an eel in this photo.

This is more or less the last view of
daylight for a few hours

From this photo 
←
it looks like Brad was in front at that point?
He's the one in the white helmet.

I think Brad's info means these 2 are .  .  .

where the shorter Lost World ends?

According to the 4 Hour Lost Wold blurb, they also abseil into the same hole we did, but had a dry tour, so the next 2 pics would have been taken fairly early on - ie, before we started to Really need our wet-suits.
Brad told me:
The 4 hour tour ends just after this top photos here and by where I was playing with the eel in the photo above. 
They climb up a 30m ladder to get to the surface. 
We travelled about 1.8kms underground and about 1.5kms from this point of this top photo here.
It was interesting that the photos Brad & Nathan took would be put on DropBox: free for us all to share, or whatever.
This was the opposite to NZOne who had charged a bit of an arm & a leg for their photos, so I opted just for the video option then ~ see blog: NZ14:Day 22 ctd.11th Dec~Jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft...

Lights in the darkness

The photos from this point on may not be in the actual order they were taken? That's because Nathan & Brad both had cameras & put them on DropBox separately, which meant I had to upload photos chosen from >60 from each camera in the order DropBox gave me, & guesstimate where each pic slotted in time-wise.

Cool alien thingyimum

A humongous stalactite jobby!

Anyway, we followed Brad or Nathan into the darkness- lit only by our head-torches. 

So, sorry, not sure which guide was in front or which one took the pics from behind - it was dark, & I was concentrating on where my feet were going & gawping at the sights lit by my head-torch!

The next 2 pics intrigued me, & I remember seeing them that day. 
I labelled them before I asked Brad about them! 
He wrote:

They are stalactites but are a combination of a stalactite, a curtain and flowstone. 
Mother nature showing how awesome she is.

Top pic:

No name. 2-2.5 metres in length

Bottom pic: 

“Alien Pod” 1-1.5 metres in length

So, even tho. the 2nd pic is called Alien Pod, my imagination saw an alien in the 1st. 
It reminds me of some sort of floaty, flying thingy I've seen in a movie, but no idea which one! 
If you know, let me know!

Be interesting to know how much rock was above us here!

I have virtually no notes for the next hour or 3, so I'll let the photos more or less speak for themselves for a bit now.

Arty pic of the Mangapu River

Note the rope on the R for hanging onto
while walking in the Mangapu River

The light bit in the middle of this pic isn't daylight, it's the torches ahead.

John posing in a waterfall
According to Brad, they call it the wee waterfall

At some point we came to a wide, but relatively low, waterfall, & Nathan & Brad got photos of us all posing in it.

Me in same one .  .  .

According to the times on DropBox, all the wee waterfall pics were taken between 1354 & 1401, so we'd been underground for over 2 hours.

as bonkers as ever :-D

My memory told me this was before we did the big fall, but it seems to be duff: see the 'big waterfall' stuff below.

Me being (relatively) normal

Our next bit of local fauna.
I hadn't a clue what sort of frog it was, so asked Brad

When I E'd Brad about this frog, he wrote:
The frog is a “Southern Bell” frog.  We also get “Green and Golden Bell” frogs as well from time to time. They don’t exactly belong in the caves and have more than likely been washed in when we see them.

Whichever frogs get washed in, it's a long hop back into the sun.

An arachnid with dodgy legs

Brad sent info about this spider as well

←

He said it's a female from the Dolomedes genus: AKA fishing spiders.

I didn't know spiders fished!

He said she is a Dolomedes Aquaticus & has an egg sack underneath her. Maybe that's why she's walking funny?  ;-p

Given there were largish spiders like this one, &

Almost positive this is not a pic of my bum squeezing
through a skinny gap under a big rock!

probably other squishy, creepy-crawly things under the rocks, squeezing under skinny gaps like this could've been rather iffy if you had arachnophobia!

Pretty sure this ain't me either .  .  .

but is this is me squeezing out of that skinny gap

Another Dolomedes Aquaticus

This is defo a big beastie
Brad says it's a Dolomedes Dondalei

You wouldn't this one hiding in your wellies!
I keep my wellies in the shed, & after finding a massive spider in one once, I got into the habit of giving them a good banging before putting them on!

This is another one of me-crawling out
from under a stalactite

Pretty sure this is 'someone' climbing up the 'big waterfall',
but it may have been Brad posing for the pic .  .  .

We had walked up-stream from the 'Lost World hole', & we had to gain several metres of height to get back towards the surface at one point.
It meant either climbing up through a larger fall than the "wee" one, or going up a ladder attached to the rock to the right of it.
John opted for the ladder, but I did my best to get up through the force of water.

This is almost defo Brad.
I blew it up big, & can't see a beard, plus he looks
way too cool leaning on his right elbow for it to be a punter  ;-p

Unfortunately, my dicky left hand was too cold to get a decent grip on the rock hand-holds, & I seemed to be just too short to grab the one I needed with my right hand with any sort of strength.
Consequently I was unable to withstand the force of the fall, & had to give up & use the ladder.


Wot a Total bugger  :-(
It still irks, 2 & a bit years later!
I'm pretty sure it was Brad yelling encouragement over the sound of the waterfall while I hung on & flailed around!
The flailing around seemed to last forever, & I swallowed quite a bit of the Mangapu: mostly through my nose!
In the end, my finger ends were so sore, I couldn't hang on at all.
I took a photo of my finger-tips the next day on the bus back to Stratford, but that pic is for that blog.
Eventually ;-p
My memory had us doing the big waterfall after the wee one, but DropBox photo timings indicate I remember wrong, & that we did this waterfall at 1330, 20 minutes before the wee one.

Those white wellies really show up in the dark!
This was about 10 past 3

My notes mention we "stopped for hot juice & choc bar @ some pt & eventually saw daylight". Gawd knows when & where we stopped, but we exited the cavern around half three.

Before that we saw the 'glow worms' Waitomo is renowned for.
And it was Awesome :-D

FYI, glow worms aren't worms at all, & while we stood there in the dark, totally entranced by the light show above us, Brad & Nathan told us they were the larvae of a flying beastie, & that the glow came out of their bums. 
Hehehe.

I got this off Google:

It was first thought that the only insects that glowed were beetles, such as the northern hemisphere fireflies. So people believed that New Zealand’s glow-worms, too, were beetles. But in the 1880s, George Vernon Hudson took glow-worm larvae from the Wellington Botanic Garden and raised them in a tank. He showed that they had a pupa stage and then emerged as a special type of adult fly – known as a fungus gnat.
And this:

In New Zealand and Australia, glow-worms are the larvae (maggots) of a special kind of fly known as a fungus gnat.  Fungus gnats look rather like mosquitoes, and most feed on mushrooms and other fungi.  However, a small group of fungus gnats are carnivores, and the worm-like larvae of these species use their glowing lights to attract small flying insects into a snare of sticky threads.  One species, Arachnocampa luminosa, is found throughout New Zealand, and others occur in Australia.  Hundreds of Arachnocampa larvae may live side by side on a damp sheltered surface, such as the roof of a cave or an overhanging bank in the forest.  Their lights resemble a star-filled night sky.  Māori call them titiwai, which refers to lights reflected in water.  The glow-worm’s tail-light shines from an organ which is the equivalent of a human kidney.  All insects have this organ but the glow-worm has a unique ability to produce a blue-green light from it.   The chemical reaction that produces the light consumes a lot of oxygen.  An airbag surrounds the light organ, providing it with oxygen and acting as a silvery reflector to concentrate the light.  A fungus gnat can glow at all stages of its life cycle (except as an egg), but the larva has the brightest light.  In caves the insects light up at any time of the day or night.  Outdoor glow-worms start glowing shortly after dark and usually shine all night.  Sometimes when a glow-worm is disturbed its light seems to go off suddenly. This is the larva slithering into a crevice, hiding its light.  It actually takes several minutes for the larva to shut off the light.

The Epic Adventurers with Glow-worms on the roof at 3.15.

When I had a look at the patterns on the roof I saw a giraffe!

My imagination, or what?

Either a giraffe or a deer with a very long nose! 

We exit the cave where the Mangapu goes in

Shortly after our Epic glow worm experience ~ it really was like a 'star-lit sky' (The Elves of the Greenwood would've loved them ;-p), we came of of the cave system into the afternoon daylight.

We'd been in that cavern for just under 4 hours, &
this was our 'official'  We Survived  photo at 1530ish

& this is the daft one  ;-)
I'm the one emptying the Mangapu out of her wellies & John's to my left.
I think Roberto is behind us & Jessica is on John's left.
Brad's white hat is at the back, & no-one has a beard, so Nathan must've took it

A pic showing the Mangapu River
flowed quite quickly

We tramped back through the great Waitomo countryside for
about 1/2 n hour. What an awesome end to a fabulous day

Despite emptying my wellies, I distinctly remember walking
squelching thru the bush hoping the bugs wouldn't start eating me!

Back at the cabin in the bush, we all went into the showers, stripped off our wet-suits & dried off while Nathan did the biz with the tongs & spatula, & Brad checked & cleared away our kit.

Getting wet wellies & wet-suits off ain't easy!

I got my camera out as well, & hope the subject of this pic won't be too upset!

We all start to dry out while Nathan cooks dinner

Having done carry-on for the whole month, & so only packing a smallish towel (knowing I'd have towels provided at Dawson Falls, Juno Hall & Kapiti Island), I'd left it at Anne-Marie's in Wellington. Today's towel was 'borrowed' from Juno.

I hope they didn't mind!

The showers were very welcome, & I'd chosen to wear long pants & a hoody so as to hide most of my delicious blood from the ravenous bush bugs while I ate.

I didn't want another episode like the one in Northland!

Look at all that lovely food cheery Nathan is
cooking. I was bloody starvin' I can tell you!

My notes tell me I ate sausages, pork steak, kumara, mixed 
veg, some salad, & washed it down with 3 tumblers of juice:
I think it was feijoa? Lovely warm bread was also involved.
Awesome :-q

Some of the juice we had was feijoa, which I'd not heard of before. As a consequence of drinking it that afternoon, I was hooked :-q
Mind you, I reckon anything would have gone down well, & from the look of the plates in the pics, none of us were Veggies!

Looking at the plates at the mo. ~  June 25th 2018, I could easily eat it right now! 

Conversation over dinner. How civilised! :-D

We are all pretty ravenous after all that
Epic excitement, so thanks to Brad &
Nathan for cheffing for us :-D

You could call this pic Happy Campers, but more 
appropriately Happy Cavers!

I know this is Brad's pic 

←

because I can 

see Nathan in the top L corner.

Like I said above, I bugged Brad for some local knowledge to help me write this blog, & one of the questions I asked was:
Who discovered the cave / route?
Brad got back to me yesterday with this info:

Initial discovery of the system would’ve been by Maori, just not documented. The first recorded discovery of it was via a hole known as “The Window” which sits alongside our main Lost World Entrance. This discovery was in 1906 by some English railway surveyors. First recorded entrance into this part of the cave wasn’t until 1954 via the same entrance of “The Window”. 

First entrance into the submergence (where we exited) was in 1948 but the cold generally stopped them progressing too far.

Isn't Brad brilliant? 
If you ever visit yourself, keep your fingers crossed he's still guiding folk on this Epic tour.
Post BBQ, we were taken back to the Waitomo Adventures centre. My notes say that ~ on the way back in the minibus, we saw wild turkeys & feral peacocks, but sadly there are no pics of those.
Maybe next time??
At the office we gave them our E-addresses for the DropBox thingy, & I remember thinking at the time "I hope it's not too bloody complicated", & 27 months later, I actually managed to get into my DropBox account & look at them all.

There were shedloads of photos, so I had to leave a load off this blog, but I think you'll agree that Brad & Nathan did a great job photographing our totally Epic day.
If that's whetted your appetite, here's a bit more info from the Waitomo Adventures website:
The 100m free-hanging abseil will astound you, but that’s only the beginning. 
Make sure you eat your lunch (provided) because you’re going to spend the rest of the day walking, wading and swimming through the cavernous passages of this famous underground system. Generally the ceiling is about 50-80m above you - this cave is big.
Yes you need to be moderately fit (e.g. go bush walking for a day), but the trip is intended for complete novices. No prior experience required – just a penchant for adventure!
See giant fossil oysters and whalebones; giant flowstone (looks like icing sugar running down the walls).  Lots of fun & optional challenges - water jumps; climbs and spiders.
Includes an absolutely fantastic glowworm display.
Also includes packed lunch & BBQ dinner.  If you came to NZ looking for top adventure, this is the thing you must do - it's the Best!
While the paperwork was being done, they displayed the pics from both cameras on a big screen in the office, & I was hoping to be able to look more closely soon.
I didn't expect it would be over 2 years later!
E-addresses swapped & paperwork done, we 8 Epic Adventurers went our separate ways, Jessica & I walked back to Juno's, John went there in his car, the 2 American girls headed out of town somewhere, & the other 3 went towards the village.
My bus was at 1050 the next morning, so I hung all my wet gear on the line & went back to the dorm to find Sarah from the US had gone & the dorm now contained 2 Germans & a Canadian from Nova Scotia. She was my 1st Nova Scotian!
Despite our awesome tea, I had room for the cake I'd bought in Stratford the day before, so had that with a few brews while watching Fellowship of the Ring (yes, again) someone had put in the DVD player. By this time (probably about the 20th time thru.!) I knew all the dialogue, but watched until the scene in the tree roots when the Dark Rider was looking for them, remembering I'd been in that exact spot  on Mt Victoria in 2009!
What a brill day that was, too, & these are some excerpts & pics from my 2009 LOR Location Odyssey blog:
Ted took 7 of us up to Mt Victoria & showed us several locations, including unidentified excrement!, the Hobbits hiding from the Nazgul, Frodo's POV on Weathertop - when the Nazgul were approaching from below, a bit from Dunharrow, & Frodo's pipe smoking tree, while Sam cooked sausages.


This is the drop where they built the tree for the Hobbits to hide from the Nazgul.




Some of us acted as Hobbits, & 3 generous souls were the Nazgul on his horse - don't ask! I'll explain once I get the photos up. 
It was well good, because Ted had a laptop with the relevant clips on, so we could see we were exactly at the right location.

 

The Nazgul shot.

In the film you can see these trees in the background 

behind the horse.

I'd NEVER have found them wandering about on my own. It took me ages yesterday to find Isengard & Rivendell. 
Another serendipitous choice, & all thanks to Kathryn at the I-site for suggesting the tour.

I don't think this needs explaining!?

I was being Frodo, complete with curved pipe.

The sausages were plastic, tho ;-p

Back in the dorm again, I re-packed my now-dry stuff, took a pic of my battered knees - but it was too dark in there & didn't show anything, stuck the camera on charge ready for next day's journey back to Taranaki, & set the alarm for 0900.

Sudoku followed, but my fellow BBHers were early birds, so it was lights out before 10.

OAO

ps: Ignore the bit below about posting at 14:something or other.  

It copied in from the original blog, the minutes figure keeps changing (Uh?) & I'm too much of a techy-doofus to know how to get rid of it!