Hot Water Beach/Waitomo

Day five, we meet our new bus driver and got a little more info on how the rest of the week will look, if you stick to the Kiwi Experience recommended itinerary. We left early and headed over to Hot Water Beach, where we stayed in dorms at a holiday park. A handful of us did a kayak tour of Cathedral Cove and spent our afternoon looking at the Coromandel Peninsula from the ocean. Hot Water Beach is known for it's hot water pools that you can dig on the beach. The geothermal activity is very high on the north island, with heaps of volcanoes and geothermal activity, and the earths crust is very thin in the Coromandel Peninsula. However, the only time to dig these natural hot springs is at low tide. Since we didn't arrive in Hot Water Beach until 1pm, that meant that we wouldn't be able to see the hot water pools until midnight. So after kayaking, we all made our own dinners in the kitchens, and hung out, killing time until midnight. We went down to the beach, in the pitch black, all bringing our flashlights torches to see where to dig. You could see the steam coming up out out of the ground and all of a sudden the sand went from cold to burning hot. I literally burned my feet walking across it. We The men started to dig in the sand, to exposure the natural springs underneath the surface, and try and get a good ratio of cold and hot water, because the water bubbling up from under the ground was scalding! We all laid down in our little pools that we dug (I held the torch while the men dug), and watched the stars for a while. It was a fun experience and nothing I have ever seen before or may ever see again!

Day six started far too early with the bus leaving at 7am to head to Waitomo. Waitomo is known for it's underwater glowworm caves. We got to the hostel in the afternoon and waited for our tour times. Ella (the girl I met on day 1) and I decided to do the cheaper/shorter version of the tour. Partially because the longer, more expensive tour has abseiling (NO THANK YOU!) and a zip line flying fox where they turn off your headlamp so you do it in a pitch black cave (DOUBLE NO THANK YOU). The guys we have been hanging out with, and the majority of the rest of the tour decided to do the more expensive, more adventurous one.  The caves are very dark and there are many areas that you start to feel a bit claustrophobic, but it was a lot of fun and very cool to see the glowworms. We weren't allowed to take cameras down in the caves, but the views were spectacular and something really unique. The guides took pictures, but it wasn't worth the price to purchase them.The worms maggots glow because their food mixes with a chemical in their bodies and produces that affect. So basically these pretty things we are looking at are maggot's shit. The glow attracts other insects to it and the worms will eat those insects. We were wearing full wetsuits, with feet and all, with a helmet with a headlamp to see where we were going, but the water was quite cold. The caves are 65meters below the ground, and they were really spectacular to look at too. There were crickets and eels, but I tried to not think about them. The shorter version, that was less physically/mentally challenging still had it's challenges. There were two waterfalls, 1 small and 1 bigger that we had to jump backwards (yes backwards!) off with our inter-tube into the water below. I did it with extreme anxiety, but I did it. It was a a lot of fun, and very cool thing to look at.  Below are pictures I found on google to give you an idea of what the caves looked like and what I looked like.

Rotorua is next.

Bye for now <3