Gloworms or sexed up maggots -Day 17

Long shower then brunch with Corina and Brian at Punnet cafe - we parked at their house and had a nice leg stretch/roll there and back. Good food and great company. 

We got back to Rachel, who'd had a morning volunteering for an Alzheimer's charity and jumped in the hire car for a drive to Waitomo, to Ruakuri Cave - it's a wheelchair accessible gloworm cave, most of the caves in Waitomo are sadly quite inaccessible. We eventually found the right place to buy our pre-booked tickets and drove to the cave. We had an anxious wait as after having been directed down a steep gravelled road (not fun for Adrian or us to get down), no one appeared as it got closer and closer to the start time of the tour. Rachel walked back up to the car park to see if we were in the right place. People came out of the cave system back no one came down and Rachel didn't come back. Rather than push Adrian back up the hill, I wuivkly walked up to find Rachel talking to one of the guides - we were in the right place but were waiting one last straggler. I walked back down to Adrian so he didn't feel he'd been abandoned in the middle of nowhere in New Zealand stuck at the bottom of a nie impossible hill climb! Raukuri (Two Dogs or Dogs Den depending on which blurb you listen too) Cave has a very cool spiral entrance. The original entrance and indeed the whole cave was shut for several years after the discovery of a Maori Chiefs burial site close to the entrance. They dug out a new entrance by hand which took an age but was certainly worth it! Our guide (a young caver called Katie) gave us a good history of the caves and showed us cool mites, tites , columns and curtains (all the beautiful shapes you'd expect to see in a cave system). We also saw the glow worms, pretty cool in the dark, but a bit less beautiful when you find out they're actually maggots! The larval stage of the fly that lives in the gave is what we call a glow worm. The first to hatch eats all its siblings and then puts out little sticky lines (a bit like a spider web) to catch other little critters to eat. The excess energy causes bioluminescence (there bums glow in the dark). Faraway this looks blue but close too it looks green - weird!! Once they've eaten and grown enough the maggots then reach the pupal stage and eventually a fly emerges from the chrysalis has 48 hours of passionate procreation, the female lays her eggs and the flies die and then the life cycle restarts. We saw several groups tubing through the black water below as we toured the caves. We came out the way we went in meaning a terrific effort back up the seven tiers of the spiral rampway. I went and drove the car down as none of us fancied the wheelchair ride back up the steep gravelly hill to the car park!! 

We drove home through winding roads and typical Kiwi countryside, green rolling hills and a few sheep. Very much in the Shire if your a budding Hobbit. 

We stoped at the Supermarket and picked up a cooked chook and salad followed by jelly tip ice cream, we paired it with wine and laughs for a perfect last night in Hamilton.