The North Island

I dropped the rent-a-wreck at the Picton docks and took a three-hour inter-island ferry ride to New Zealand’s capitol city of Wellington. While there, I toured Parliament, the Tu Papa Museum, beautiful botanical gardens and caught parts of the Homegrown Music Festival. The music festival was an all day event with forty-some bands playing on six stages along the Wellington waterfront. The town was overrun with cute young girls. I had a great time.

After my vain search for a hotel on the South Island’s wet, West Coast, I shelved the drive-by method for web-based reservations. My first night out of Wellington, I picked the Waitamo Caves Hotel which gave me a second floor view room in a 1909 Victorian. The place has sweeping staircases, large open fireplaces and a range of rooms from suites in the turret to bunk beds for backpackers. My queen bed room is something in the middle.

And who could stay at the Waitamo Caves Hotel and not visit the Waitamo Caves? I choose black-water rafting for my day’s adventure. It involves a wetsuit, miner’s headgear and a miner’s raft (inner tube). There were guides too, thankfully. Who’d want to float through glow worm lit caves without a guide? I didn't have enough Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn in me to find out if that next waterfall was three feet tall or thirty.

Of the ten others in my group, all of them, including the two guides, were young enough to be my kids. So what? We became a tight bunch and some of the Brit party girls even flirted with me like they meant it. The tour included three hours of jumping off waterfalls and drifting below glowworms, all on the dark underground rivers flowing through million year-old caves. There were no lighted pathways and no handrails. This was New Zealand adventuring at its finest!!!