Waitomo
When planning this trip, one of my priorities was Waitomo. Firstly, there are glowworms in the caves there - something I’ve never seen. Secondly, there is a unique activity there called blackwater rafting. Very much my kind of place. With hitchhiking there now not feeling like a good idea (see previous post!), I decided to rent a car just for the day and drive there and back.
Being called ‘blackwater rafting’ I imagined it to be similar to white water rafting - an adrenaline activity. Any adrenaline actually came from the cold water we were in rather than the activity, but I loved the experience. Wet-suited up, we worked our way through what might be my favourite cave I’ve been in. Consistently narrow and windy, with occasional high ceilings, and a fast flowing river running all the way through it. It was more like a very basic version of canyoning, but in a cave. There were some fairly low waterfall jumps, some small rapids, but the highlight was switching off all lights and floating through caverns lit only by glowworms. It felt a little like a sensory deprivation tank - floating dreamily and slightly numb from cold. The worms on the cave ceiling were like stars in the night sky, in little clusters. It was mesmerising.
After some warm complimentary soup (an excellent touch!) I drove back to Rotorua. I’d really enjoyed the driving during the day - the views were simply beautiful, and the roads were good quality and fun to drive. At night in the rain it became much harder work, with me needing to concentrate hard or where the road went with no streetlights, but it allowed me to get from A to B without having to be home by sundown. I decided to have a look at something I’d heard about from a few people - car relocation. Basically, sometimes people want to rent cars in one place and leave them in another, and it’s expensive for the rental companies to move them back again. In relocating a car, you move it back to where it needs to be. You get a free rental and the rental company has their car moved back. Everyone wins. The difficulty is finding the right relocation, and sadly there were none from Rotorua. Very luckily though (many people have since told me I’ve got very lucky) there was a relocation from Auckland airport to Queenstown - my final destination in New Zealand. It meant getting a bus back to Auckland airport, the wrong direction and backtracking, then driving back south again, but it would then mean I had a free rental car for a week, and transport sorted for the rest of the country. An excellent find.
The next day, after a walk through the picturesque redwood forest near to Rotorua, I caught a bus back to Auckland, ready to restart my adventure - this time with my own car.