The town of Waitomo is famous for having hundreds of caves, but even more famous for the glowworms that inhabit many of those caves. While you can see glowworms above ground in a number of places in New Zealand, there’s something very special about being in a cave illuminated solely by the light of thousands of tiny insects.
There are a few companies offering glowworm tours, and I scheduled trips with both Spellbound Tours and with the very popular Waitomo Glowworm Tours, the company that originated these trips more than 100 years ago. While Waitomo Tours had the better cave, Spellbound had the better glowworm experience. Spellbound’s cave is relatively short, but we went in with just a dozen people, walked a bit to get our eyes adjusted to the dark (photo below), then took a magical, no-photographs-allowed boat trip up and down an underground river with tens of thousands of glowworms lighting the place up and reflecting in the water. It was a scene straight out of the movie Avatar, and we got a good long while to enjoy it. Following that trip Spellbound took us to another cave that had many fewer glowworms, but a ton of stalactites and stalagmites to enjoy.
For the afternoon I booked one of the last trips of the day with Waitomo Glowworm Tours on their main cave tour, hoping that all of the tour buses would be gone, and that worked out well since it ended up being a less-crowded experience than most groups get. The cave was bigger and the cave formations were more impressive, but it felt more commercial and busy than the morning trip, and while it was still really, really neat, it didn’t have quite the same magic as the morning tour. Finally the day of many glowworms ended after sunset with a trip to the glowworm grotto next to my cabin, and I got to finish the day with a fern-covered cliff and its many hundreds of glowing bugs all to myself. Unfortunately photography today was a bit tricky since it’s hard to manually focus on a fly larvae in the darkness, but the two photos below hopefully give some sense of what it was like.
Tomorrow I’ve got a trip to one more glowworm cave, then it’s off to the impressive volcano of Egmont National Park. There’s a massive storm blowing up from the south, so odds are that the next few days may be the first bit of the trip to get rained out, but we’ll see if the weather gods decide to intervene and provide dry trails.
SOOOOO AMAZING! Love the closeup shot, I didn’t know about the strands. Looks like a glowing chandelier. 😍
I took about a billion shots trying to figure out how to capture the threads in the dark. I took some in all darkness, took some with a little bit of light, tried a million different ways to see if I could get my camera to focus accurately. And then (of course) then next day on the Ruakuri tour the guide was a filmmaker, lit some threads perfectly for us, and I got a good shot without even trying 🙂