New Zealand Holiday 2014, March 14 (Doctor Worm)

I booked a couple of tours down in Waitomo for the day, the only problem is that Waitomo is nearly two hundred kilometres away. The options were one of those discount buses or renting a car. The bus would be slightly cheaper, but they only have a couple of buses in each direction each day, so it would have been a really long day.

So with that decided I had a Toyota Carolla booked for the day! The options were quite limited, in the end I chose a Carolla instead of a Camry. The car looked shiny and new, and even still had a bit of new car small left in it. I also ordered a GPS unit because I'd be helpless without it, and we were on the road by about 7:30am. Driving out of Auckland meant the traffic wasn't too bad and the first one hundred kilometres was done in a little over an hour.

Beats getting a bus.

The second half of the trip was much, much slower as the highway passes through ten or more small towns, meaning large periods driving at 70km/h or even 50km/h. There was also several roadworks along the way where they "suggest" going down to 30km/h. The GPS unit stupidly chose the "shorter" back route for the final stage of the drive, which contained non-stop bends in the road and blind turns, so it took about two and a half hours to reach Waitomo in the end.

At Waitomo we got the tickets sorted out but had to wait about half an hour for the next guided tour of Ruakuri Caves to begin. The host who turned up was pretty good, he is a cave explorer in his spare time so was quite enthusiastic and interested in telling the group about the history of the place and caving in general. The tour lasted for nearly two hours, we got to walk through the underground caves, see rock formations and even a few glowworms.

Inside Ruakuri caves.

Also inside Ruakuri caves.

After that was done it was back into the car to drive down the road to the second tour. This one was a shorter one at the Glowworm Caves. There was a bit of repeated information from the previous tour, but the host did a good job and the best part was the boat trip at the end where you get to see the main collection of the glowworms. Several other more "extreme" activities were possible at this place that we did not do, I was interested in trying the one where you ride down the cave rivers in inner tubes, but it ran for three hours and Jason didn't want to do it.

Outside Glowworm Caves.

It was already mid afternoon so I started the long drive back to Auckland, hoping to possibly get to downtown before the peak hour traffic hit. The first hour was again full of twists and turns so you rarely get close to the possible 100km/h, but overall I was making pretty good time until twelve kilometres out of Auckland, and then everything stopped... There was no sign of any accident, just traffic backed up for miles, averaging less than 20km/h. After a painful half hour the traffic finally got going and I just had to stop off to refuel the car before dropping it off. I thought our fuel prices were bad, but New Zealand is another level entirely, for the week I was there it was between $2.10 and $2.15 per litre.

For dinner we had to make another visit to the amazing Burger Fuel, before heading back to the hotel to avoid the bad weather closing in from Cyclone Lusi that was bearing down from the north.