DOWN UNDER OVER HERE
As summer approaches and thoughts turn to homegrown holidays, Eveline Harvey finds magic above and below ground in Waitomo.
It’s not summer but a squally spring weekend in the middle of the school holidays when we join the slow roll of Friday traffic heading south. Yet as we weave through the darkening landscape of well-watered Waikato fields, a long-forgotten passage from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer
Night’s Dream suddenly pops into my head:
The lines are spoken by a fairy, who’s telling mischievous sprite Puck the lengths she’s been going to prettying up the place for her queen, Titania. And whether you believe in fairies or not, there’s no denying the sense of magic you encounter on a visit to Waitomo.
We wake to a light drizzle the following morning and head up the road to Ruakuri Cave. The longest of the area’s guided underground tours, Ruakuri exceeds all expectations from the moment we shuffle inside and find ourselves standing at the top of a 15m-high spiral. As we peer down, the levels are illuminated, showing us the path we’ll be taking to enter the bowels of the cave. It’s all our 3-year-old, Bryn, can do to stop himself from sprinting full tilt into the depths, but he remembers the briefing we’ve given him not two minutes earlier — “no running, no shouting, no touching the rock formations” — and manages to restrain himself.
This is an excellent tour for families as the groups are kept small and there’s plenty of time to ask questions of the guides. It’s also wheelchair- and stroller-friendly: our younger son, Luke, takes the darkness as a hint it’s time to nap and dozes for the entire hour and a half we’re underground.
Guide Beth explains the glow worms we’re about to see are the larvae of the fungus gnat. But if the lights they produce are pretty, the process to get to that point is as competitive as you’ll find anywhere in the animal kingdom. A female gnat lays clusters of up to 200 eggs before she dies but the first to hatch has a distinct advantage, feasting on the only food source it can readily access — its non-hatched siblings — to get the energy for its first glow.
Bryn seems equal parts aghast and enchanted at this prospect — “Mummy, they eat their brothers and sisters!” — so thankfully Beth has another gem of information up her sleeve with which to distract him . . . the distinctive blue glow the larvae emit is actually nothing more glamorous than their poo. Cannibalistic worms that dangle fishing lines to catch prey and secrete bioluminescent faeces? What little boy wouldn’t love these creatures!
There’s something to be said for witnessing your child’s first reaction to something as miraculous as these otherworldly pin pricks of light deep underground. I see the wonder on his
I do wander everywhere, Swifter than the moon’s sphere; And I serve the fairy queen, To dew her orbs upon the green.