"and you trust me?"

After driving through some gorgeous countryside, Matt and I finally make it to our first destination, Waitomo, famous for its glow worm caves. Of course, taking a cute boat ride (equivalent to It's A Small World at Disneyland) just to see the glow worms is not the way to start a trip (in my humble opinion), so I signed us up for the Black Abyss adventure. Matt had no idea what I was getting him into except that some part of this trip would include black water rafting.

Alan and Terry were our tour guides for this trip and they got us started by supplying us with cold, used wet suits, helmets, and gear for abseiling. There were three others on our trip, James from UK and Nicole & Natalie from Canada, who ended up being great company and future traveling friends. After gearing up, we took a short drive to the beginning of our 5-hour trip, where we learned a cute little rhyme to set up the rope in our abseiling rack and tips/tricks for stopping ("stick your thumb in your bum!"). Soon enough, Matt and I were abseiling 150 meters down into a super dark cave where all you see in front of was cave wall (now I know what those kids felt like in the movie The Descent). We tramped around the caves a little bit to our next stop, without any forewarning from our guides, to do a fox swing for another 100M in pitch black because they told us to turn our lights. Since I was the first in line, I was the first to go, thinking the whole time "Alan, what in the world are you strapping me into?!" The fox swing ended being an exhilarating ride as we flew through the air with hundreds of glow worms above us and stopping with a huge, terrifying bang created by Terry slamming an inner tube against the cave walls. He also decided to sneak up on me as I had no idea why I was still hanging above who knows how many feet off the ground. For a better explanation, we were strapped to this rope line from the gear on our waist and then flew down this dark tunnel without the slightest idea as too how long we were swinging or if anything was going to jump out and eat us. This was the warmest part of the trip...

We took a snack break that included a nice, hot cup of coffee while sitting along a cliff overlooking the river below. Despite the lighting gear on our heads, it was still pretty difficult to figure out how far below the water was to us. Soon after, Terry and Alan handed us inner tubes and proceeded to tell us very quick instructions on how to jump down into the water without losing our raft ("you want to land on your bum") and we lined up to free fall from a 10 ft cliff into the cave river (at a good high temperature of about 9C). Luckily, we only had to hand paddle for about 20M before we reached the rope line used for guiding us the rest of the way. Terry guided us through the river sharing stories of glow worms (that are actually maggots... who wants to see the famous glow maggots?!), a stalagmite formation that looked like Gandalf, and a rock that fell down from the roof of the cave. Following our little excursion on rafts, we walked through more river, sliding down a waterfall on a man made slide, swimming through this tiny crevice while Terry took the nice open route, and stopped for a second snack break before starting the last leg of our trip.

In order to get out, we had to walk, crawl, and climb our way through the Black Labyrinth and at one point Matt started leading us through this maze, ensuring that none of us would fall into the big hole. At the fork in the cave, we had the choice to either take the pansy route out or climb 30M of waterfall and of course, we chose the latter :o) Terry is a huge rock climber, which was very beneficial for us as he instructed us where to place our feet and hands to grip certain rocks to climb up. This was absolutely amazing as we made our way up while gallons of water kept pouring down. On our way up, we had to stretch out and we all just looked at Terry like he was crazy asking us to stretch our left leg out to the far wall with all the confidence that we would stick it okay and won't slip and break some bones. This climb was two trips, 20M for the first and at least 10M for the second and probably my favorite part. Five hours later, we made it back outside for another hike back up to the road to get in our car. We were wet, cold, drained, and I couldn't have felt any better. Knowing that there were super hot showers, soup and bagels waiting for us when we got back was helpful too.

Pictures will hopefully come soon...