Tim finally woke up, Madagascar was on tv, we ate our cereal, drank our coffee, and were on the road towards Waitomo by 8:10. Chilly morning, pretty gloomy and cloudy and misty so far. Neither one of us care! Although, despite the airing out of the van for the afternoon yesterday, it still reaks of nasty. More airing out today will have to occur. We had a great day yesterday and today should be equally awesome. Today is Anzac Day, so we might be out of luck on that one. Seems like everything is closed for the morning, and then opens mid afternoon or so. We got to Waitomo and there were several different tour companies with different booths, and we really couldn’t tell which one was ours, so we ended up going into the i-site to ask.
Drove to the Aranui Cave, it was a bit of a hike up hill to the teeny tiny entrance to the cave.
But once inside, it was huge. The guide pointed out the cricket like Wetas right away, giving me the creeps of being jumped on the whole time. Great. We then proceeded into numerous rooms and passageways seeing the different formations of rock and limestone within the cave. It was really quite awesome. There were massive rooms with tons of tiny icicle like rocks, and other small hallways with HUGE boulder formations. She said that in the cave underground was one of the safest places to be during an earthquake, which I found interesting. 
That in the cave, you could come out ad have no idea that an earthquake had even happened. Apparently most of the guides are direct ancestors of the Chief that showed white people the caves. She also said that people had weddings in the Aranui cave, which I found super interesting. 
Kinda weird, but it really is that romantic beautiful in the cold rock sort of way. So much of it looked like melting ice. The tour lasted only half an hour, then back through the tiny hole and down the path. This meant though, that we would for sure be able to make the 11am Glowworm tour. Waited at the top for a little bit, and right as our guide got there, this large Asian group came bounding up, and the leader pushed through the 14 people in our tour, like violently, and started rudely demanding exclamations and things, as we were trying to follow our guide. Just insanely rude. They followed our group into the cave and in the very first room we listened to her talk about it, and as we turned to leave the first room, the leader BOUND through the area that was barred off and tried to get the guide to give him her flashlight. The gall of that guy was just beyond me. And then for the rest of the tour he was rude, the whole group was, lagging behind by a lot. The tour guide eventually just stopped waiting for them to being her talk, and they were loud.
We went to a small room and saw a few glow worm glows, and then bent down and saw a lot more, but then she turned on the lights, and we could see the really gross creepy strings hanging from the ceiling. It was really gross. Next was the boat. We had to wait as we boarded one at a time, and by the time it got to Tim and I, she asked if we could split and sit one in front of the other, we didn’t want to, but said ok. I went and sat in the back row, the corner nonetheless, and Tim went to sit in front of me, and then she told him to sit on the complete other side of the boat another row ahead. I couldn’t even see him anymore.
I was not happy. I was in a boat, in the complete dark, with long spidery glowworm webs overhead, and expecting something to come eat me at any moment. It was 100% straight from Voldemort’s cave that Harry and Dumbledore have to cross. Exactly. So the whole ride was spent in silence, which made it that much creepier, and I couldn’t figure out how the boat was even moving. I later saw that the guide was standing on te front of the boat, pulling us along with a rope on the ceiling. We exited, and in the gift shop it was FLOODED with Asians spending $30 to buy the picture of us in the boat. No pretty cave behind us, or glow worms, just us in the boat. Weird. And yet, still rude.
On the third trip on the same city block in the hunt for lunch, I saw that one of the cafes had desserts in a case, so I figured we could do Subway and a nice dessert, so we went in Scotts Epicurean, and they looked FANTABULOUS. We decided to get one for dinner dessert too and share both. I picked this caramel coconut bar, that ended up being like a thick caramel filling on a crust with a crunchy coconut top layer, served with yogurt and berries in a cup. Tim picked Sticky Date bread, a big slice, that came with a yogurt/toffee sauce cup.
This was the first Subway bread that was back to US standards. The sheer amount of Subways in this country is insane. It’s the Starbucks of New Zealand. I seriously don’t think we have hit a single town bigger than the size of Hudson that hasn’t had at least one Subway. Most have numerous. They LOVE Subway, otherwise there really isn’t much fast food. Dominoes. A few Burger Kings, handful of McDs. That’s it. Just a crap load of Subways.
Spent the afternoon at the hotel, Tim making a Kmart run, and went to the Countdown for waters. Walked back, I had intended to do yoga, but Tim kept laughing at me, and the video wasn’t very good. Plus, I had found a bikram yoga place in Auckland that I really want to try to get to tomorrow. So I scratched the yoga plan and looked through the Sydney book instead while Tim journaled. After that, I started our electric skillet dinner of red pepper, tomato, taco seasoning, and chicken. Tim had the last pita, we shared the quinoa salad from the store.
We sat down and plugged through the Sydney book, looking at the different places online, making our Must list and our maybe list, compared it to Moms, and mapping the different places on the map. I emailed mom with our own itinerary and questions about hers (since we had looked at her most recent plan, and from what we see, it looks fine by us). I feel better about Australia. She has some awesome things on her plan, and from what we have read on Sydney, I feel like I am getting to see literally everything that I would want to, and not missing much, which was a huge worry of mine on this trip. Tim was asleep by 11:45. I posted pictures, blog entries, and was ready for bed by 12:20. But somehow, I ended up on Tumblr til 12:45. Then FORCED myself to bed.
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