Little did they know, it was actually maggots.

Waitomo
Population: 12, 30 million sheep/cows/goats, 3 billion glow worms, lots of tourists
You can't get lost in Waitomo. There is one road. It is the highway. Waitomo is a cafe and a few caving companies. That is literally it. The buses don't run to Waitomo. Waitomo's sole source of entertainment is glow worms in caves.

So...glow worms... they sound so sweet and innocent, beautiful even. Beautiful yes, sweet and innocnet...bahahaha..haha. No way. First of all, they are actually MAGGOTS! Maggots who eat each other and have glowing poop. Basically their life consists of eating their siblings so they have enough energy to spins little fishing lines. Sticky webs of death, as our cave guide put it. The glowing excrement is meant to attract all sorts of little bugs, and occasionally..gasp...their parents. yes, if mommy and daddy bug are dumb enough to fly towards their children, they get eaten. More interesting facts for your day : The adult version of the glow worm is a fly, but it has..get this...no digestive system...yay! So the fly can only live long enough to reproduce before it dies of starvation. So, imagine you are fly egg, you are born, gorge yourself in a cannibalistic fashion, eat your parents and then after all that, you become a fly, and CRAP you can't eat anymore.

But they are pretty to look at. We tourists are so ridiculous. Really, I just paid almost $200 to freeze my ass off in a cave and look at maggot poop. Yet I still got out of the cave thinking it was worth it, so that has to mean something. We spent about 3 hours in the caves, rappelling and zip lining and drinking coffee. yes, they served afternoon tea and cookies in a cave. Neither hell, high water, nor caving will ever get in the way of afternoon tea.

Our guides kept trying to freak us out, talking about the eels that lived in the water and going on and on about this one 8 ft eel and blah blah blah. One of them (Josh) tried to catch and eel and ended up thrashing around in the water like a fool. The two Irish girls on the trip were pretty freaked out..i was entertained :)

We ended up seeing someone we had met in Rotorua, our roommate Olli, at the start of the trip. We hung out with him for a couple hours, which was cool. It's so neat that we keep running into people we've met earlier. maybe you only talked to them once, but you greet like friends anyway. It's really cool. Of course, there was this one mildly obnoxious American guy that we met in Rotorua who we saw in Raglan. He greeted me as "hey Canada". We didn't like him very much.. he liked himself enough, he didn't need our help.


I'm, in New Plymouth at the moment, taking advantage of FREE LIBRARY INTERNET! We rode some rented bikes along the coast today, and then Aleah and I had a nap in a park. We were very nearly killed by ducks. Yes, I nearly saw a small child devoured by ducks, before they descended on us. I kept telling them "really, i have no bread for you...let me eat my Popsicle in peace" but apparently they didn't understand English.
Must learn to speak duck.

Quack quack quack.
Love you all
Sydney

AND MORE PICTURES ARE UP ON FLICKR www.flickr.com/sydsquid so enjoy :)