We prebooked a 3 hour excursion called The Black Labyrinth with the Black Water Rafting company. It was at 8:30 AM, but the meeting point was just 10 minutes from our motel. When we got there, we each pulled on a wetsuit over our bathing suits. I really struggled to get mine on - those suits are tight!
There were ten other tourists with us for this adventure. Each of us got an inflated inner tube. They took us to a slow moving river, told us to put the inner tube behind our butts, and told us jump backwards into the river as far as we could, landing with a big splash. This was a practice for how we would descend two waterfalls while inside the Aranui Cave. This also got river water into the wetsuits, where it would be trapped and warmed up by our bodies as we ventured over to the cave entrance.
Once we were in the cave, we were always in water; it was just a question of how deep the water was - sometimes knee high, sometimes waist high. We floated on the inner tubes any time the water was more than knee deep. There were two energetic guides showing us where to step along the way - sometimes there was a ledge under the water that you didn't want to miss, lest you find yourself in unexpectedly deep water. Sometimes we floated on our bellies on the tubes and went face forward, sometimes we put the tubes beneath us and drifted feet first. At one section the guides called "the limbo" there was only a couple feet of clearance between the top of the water and the cave ceiling - I presume that if rain water raises the river level too much then this trip would have to be cancelled.
After falling backwards over the two waterfalls, the group assembled into the "chain" formation, where all the tubes lined up in a long row, with our feet resting on the inner tube directly in front . We turned off our headlamps and let the current carry us through the darkness. We soon saw the glowworms overhead. They lit up the ceiling nicely, almost like a starry sky on a dark night. There were several clumps of worms, so it perhaps took ten to fifteen minutes to see them all. That was the end of our adventure. We climbed out of the cave, stripped off the wetsuits and had some lunch.
We spent the afternoon driving south towards Egmont National Park. New Zealand is a big island, and although most of the roads post 100 kph (60 mph) signs, the twisty winding roads mean you can't really drive that fast. Also, drivers must slow down to 50 kph when passing through a town. We got to our lodging at Te Popo Gardens in late afternoon. The owners of the place were really nice and friendly, and the "Wild Cat" room that we stayed in was probably our best lodging of the trip.
This is the map of TePopo Gardens. We walked almost all of those trails in the evening. The blue line that winds through the map is actually a deep gorge with a river at the bottom; it is almost as if the TePopo Gardens are encircled by a defensive moat.
