Day 1 – Waitomo and the glow worms

Still trying to adjust to the time difference of 20 hours I was used to going to sleep at 11 or 12 pm which was 7:30pm in Auckland. I made it to about 10:30 and woke up at 4:30am. I thought it would be a great time to catch up on email and plan some of the activities of my trip, but my watch was an hour off and I had to run out of the hostel to catch the first leg of the Magic bus tour.

Our first major stop was the town of Waitomo – known for their glow worms (……) and blackwater rafting. Waitomo in Maori and stands for water hole or shaft. In this region there are over 300 mapped caves and limestone caverns. The caves in Waitomo are famous because the provide just the right conditions for the glowworms to flourish.
New Zealand is one of the few countries in the world that has blackwater rafting, blackwater rafting is cave tubing. We floated on a tube through an underground river where we were surrounded by glow worms. It was a bit weird to be that far underground and be floating on a river wrapped in a 7mm wetsuit. When you turned your head lamps out you could not see your hand in front of your face but the glowworms shone brightly. We were underground for about 1 hour.

Glowworms are actually the larvae of the fungus gnat which looks similar to a mosquito. The larvae glow-worms have luminescent organs which produce a greenish light. They weave a sticky web and suspend themselves from the ceiling. They dangle sticky threads down below them to capture insects that are attracted by the light. The thread paralyzes the insect and then the glowworm reels them in. They only need to eat one insect every few days and their light get brighter the longer they have gone without food. The larvae stage lasts about 6-9 months or until the larvae grows to about the size of a matchstick. Then it enters the pupa stage and emerges an adult fungus gnat after a couple weeks. The adult only lives a few days because it does not have a mouth to eat. So it has just enough time to mate, lay eggs. If you shine a light on a glowworm it will extinguish their light and takes a few hours to regenerate.