Day 12 - Afternoon, Karst landscape and guess what?

Jan 12 - Afternoon by Jono
After our cave rafting adventure we had a couple of hours to kill before our next appointment so we went for a walk to visit the Mangapohue Natural Bridge. This is a cave system that formed and then collapsed, leaving just a bit at the end forming a natural bridge over the gorge.

Link to panorama

Link to panorama

Link to panorama

The walk was visually very stunning as it wound its way through the trees and along by the river on wooden walkways. Steps took us up closer to the roof of the natural bridge and provided a great place to take photos and gaze around.
We also stopped to take some photos of beehives and mailboxes on the drive back that we will always associate with New Zealand, they are everywhere.

beehives are dotted around the countryside, in brightly coloured groups

at the end of every rural road there are a collection of mailboxes in all sorts of shapes and sizes

Our last stop before leaving Waitomo was the Ruakuri cave. This is the longest cave walk in New Zealand, and one of only 2 fully wheelchair accessible in the world, although the path isn't amazingly wide so narrower wheelchairs probably cope better! It means pushchairs can also be taken through the caves too. The natural dry entrance to the cave is via a Maori sacred area, and so there has been some clever engineering to create a spiral ramp and walkways so that you can explore the cave from a different entrance that respects the sacred land.
At one point we crossed paths with the other tours through the cave; we had spotted one of the walkways as we floated through on our tubes that morning hanging above us, there were more people floating down below us but I didn't hear anyone singing quite as well as I did though!

spiral walkway down to the bottom of the cave

At the bottom of the spiral there is a limestone rock, this rock has a constant stream of water hitting it from above, and the erosion in just the few years it has been there if clear to see. On the way in and out we all did a little bit of hand washing and arm waving to stop us transporting evil in or out of the cave ;)

washing hands 

Gollum pool and cave

It's a long tour and passes through lots of different areas where the lights were turned on for us to pass through and turned off once we had left. This is to help preserve the caves so too much light doesn't affect the glowworms and other creatures and plants that live in the cave. Many areas were stunning and our guide gave us lots of information about the history of the cave, how it was discovered by the Maori and pointed out different formations as we went through.

 Near the end of the tour we walked along a gallery away from the river to a quiet pool, where the guide told us Andy Serakis did his Gollum practice, the cave sounds were recorded for The Hobbit and the scan of the cave for the movie set.

Then off we went to Otorohanga for a solid good old fashioned curry.