Our tour was at 1pm, so we had plenty of time to get up, pack, and get there.
Really, words don't describe how neat Hobbiton is, so here are a bunch of pictures.
After Hobbiton, we made the rather long drive to the Waitomo Caves Hotel, situated within a km of the well known Waitomo glow worm caves. I know, I usually find a cool alternative to some of these really touristy places, and last time I went to NZ I did. I went to a family-owned farm with a cave on the property, paid them $20 USD, and they let me and Marshall traipse around and see some glow worms. BUT there are three caves in Waitomo, and people have said that this experience is really worth it. Also, Marshall and Nolan went black water rafting.
What is black water rafting you ask? It's inner tubing down a river through a cave without lights. It's not for me. Not even a little bit.
Wait! Before I go into details of my awful, terrible, no good time in multiple caves, I need to go back to the hotel. You see, our wonderful travel agent Audra warned us when she booked that the Waitomo Caves hotel might not be as comfortable or as nice as the other hotels. We were expecting a little roadside motel or something similar, but when we pulled up the driveway we were blown away, in a good way. This hotel was spectacular! It was a very old mansion and clearly used to be a fancy resort for very wealthy New Zealanders a hundred years ago, and now it's a moderately priced hotel. It was so fancy and magnificent, sitting on a bluff overlooking the valley that leads to the caves. We couldn't wait to get inside.
Then we went inside.
This place is the Overlook Hotel. I'm not kidding. It's legit haunted. If my uncle started running around with an axe I would not have been surprised. Looking back at the outside of the hotel, it looks like the Overlook so I don't know how I let myself be fooled right away.
The next morning we went to the caves. Marshall and Nolan did the rafting while the rest of us did a tour of two of the caves. The first cave, the Ruakuri cave, was a typical cave, so naturally, I hated every second of it. I spent twenty minutes silently crying while everyone else oohed and ahhed about cave walls. The only interesting structure in the cave was the ribbon stalactite, which I had never seen before, despite being dragged around caves on multiple continents. Ribbons form when the general shape of the cave is an A-frame, so mineral-rich water runs down the wall before dripping, creating a ribbon or curtain shaped stalactite rather than a cone.
The second cave in our tour was the famous Waitomo cave. This is the cave with the glow worms. Except at first it's just a regular cave. Admittedly, the cavern was much larger, so I was less in a panic as I was during the Ruakuri tour, but still nothing of note. To exit the caves, we climb aboard these little boats and silently sail through a very small cavern, where millions of glow worms light up the ceiling like constellations. That was pretty cool. We had to remain completely silent or else we might hurt or even kill the worms. The boats captains pulled us in the dark on ropes so as not to even disturb the water.
We finished our tours around the same time as Nolan and Marshall finished theirs. We piled into separate cars and made our way to the Coromandel Peninsula. My car stopped at the Alphra Lavenders Farm. We met a friendly man who owned the farm with his wife as an after-work hobby. We love supporting local businesses, so we bought a few lavender products and explored the grounds a bit.
We made it to the Coromandel just in time for low tide. That sounds like a weird time to want to arrive at a beach, but on the Coromandel is a beach called Hot Water Beach. Underneath the sand lies a natural hot spring, and at low tide, if you dig a hole, it will fill with hot water and you can have a personal hot tub. Mom said this turned out to be the highlight of the trip for her, so it's good we made it! All of this happened in two days, and so that night, we slept pretty hard.
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