Waitomo Area Guide
The small town of Waitomo, an hour's drive south of Hamilton, conceals its attractions below the surface, where there is an eerily beautiful network of limestone caves lit by thousands of glowworms.
The Maori name Waitomo translates as 'the stream which flows into the hole in the ground', and the town has been attracting visitors to its magical caves since the 19th century.
There are many different cave tours on offer here, from gentle underground boat trips through grottoes illuminated by glowworms, to adventure caving trips involving hundred-metre abseils down into dark caves. Waitomo tourist operators can claim to have invented a new term, 'blackwater rafting', for floating through calm underwater cave streams in rubber inner tubes, the caves lit only by cavers' head lamps.
The Waitomo village is small and the Visitor Centre in the Museum of Caves will advise on cave tours and walking tracks in the area. The museum has informative displays on the geology and history of the caves, interactive displays on the lifecycle of glowworms, and a cave crawl to test your claustrophobia index.
The longest-established cave experience is at the Waitomo Glowworm Caves, 500 metres west of the Visitor Centre. The cave is easily accessible, with paved walkways, and lighting to show off the cave's limestone features, including the magnificent Pipe Organ, a seven-metre round column estimated to be 750,000 years old. The Cathedral Cavern on the lower level is renowned for its superb acoustics, which have been used by New Zealand opera singer Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. The tour finishes with a boat trip through the cave grotto, where the glowworms shine like tiny stars.
The nearby Aranui Cave, three kilometres west, is a beautiful cave with thousands of tiny straw stalactites hanging from the ceiling, and a lofty 20-metre high Cathedral. Tour operators Spellbound offer smaller group tours to the Mangawhitikau cave, which was chosen to feature in Sir David Attenborough's BBC documentary, Life in the Undergrowth, because of its spectacular glowworms.
To explore the unusual limestone landscape from above ground, drive to the nearby Ruakuri Scenic Reserve and walk along the bush track to see caves and limestone arches and night-time glowworm displays. Twenty-four kilometres west of Waitomo there is a short walking track to the dramatic Mangapohue Natural Bridge, a 17-metre high limestone arch which is all that remains of a collapsed cave. The walk is pretty at night, when the underside of the bridge is lit by glowworms, or if you visit during the day there are ancient marine fossils along the track.
Keep travelling west to find the short five-minute walking track to the beautiful multi-tiered waterfall, the Marokopa Falls.
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