I tried to think of a clever opening for this entry, but as you can tell, I didn't think of anything.
We left Hobbiton at around noon. We had an appointment to the caves at 3. It was about an hour away. We had the option of taking the canoes through the caves or taking the walking tour. We decided on the walking tour. There are several companies that do the tours. I have no idea which one is best or anything. I thought I had booked one place, but it turns out, I booked another. The one I thought I had booked had a restaurant and a gift shop in it. We went there first, only to find out our reservation was down the road a bit, near the start of the caves.
There are several caves in the area. I am not sure if they are all connected or not. Since we seemed to be the only ones going on our tour, I don't know if the other groups went to different caves or were all on the water. It didn't really matter. Our tour was great.
Since we had so much time, we went to our tour place, looked around, and then decided to return to the other place to have lunch before our tour started. It was only about 5 minutes up the road.
Lunch was ok, although everything we wanted, they seemed to be out of. We wanted a cheese plate, no cheese, a pizza, no pizza, some chili fries, no chili. We ended up just having a couple of orders of fries and I think something else, but I can't remember what it was. Wasn't bad, just wasn't what we wanted.
Of course, we went through the gift shop. Juanita got a t-shirt. Maeghan got a poster or something. The rest of us just kind of waited for them to finish, or they waited, I had to hang around and pay for everything. Funny how that works.
The tour itself was pretty good. I had picked that one because it said it was wheelchair friendly. I am not sure what other paths there might have been, but this one was friendly except for one very tight squeeze. We made it, but not without some finagling. There were a couple of places where it was totally dark, where they turned off the lights for us and you could just hear the water running down below. What I assumed was far down below, but when they turned the lights back on and shined a flashlight over the side, it was about three feet away. Scared most of us as we didn't expect it to be that close. We did have one other encounter with the water when a group of kayakers went by far below us. We could talk to them and they to us but they were pretty far away. Good acoustics I guess.
The highlight of the tour was something that is not normally part of it, or so I am told. The young lady who was our guide, and I say young but being as old as I am, everyone is young, she apparently was a singer. On the way back up, she sang a couple of songs. Long slow dirges, but she was pretty good and we enjoyed it immensely. She was that good. She went on a bit long when we were on the spiral walkway back to the entrance, but it made the walk a bit easier. She apparently couldn't walk up with us and sing at the same time, or maybe she had to wait at the bottom for some reason, but once we got to the top, we had to wait for her to climb up to let us out.
It was a good tour, and I assume the other tours that other companies have are just as good. I would recommend going to the glow-worm caves if you get the chance. Well worth the drive from Rotorua, about an hour and a half from there. Hobbiton is about an hour but it takes you towards the caves, so that is why we did both in one day. A very good day and I must say it was planned very well, even if I did all the planning.
We had another busy day planned for the next day. We didn't need to get up as early or travel very far, so it was a slow, see the sites and do some adventuring the next day. I was going to put it all in this one entry, but I think I will do the next day in the next entry. I know you are probably getting tired of this trip report, but we had fun.
And, I believe, I can say this is the best trip we have ever had together. We have had some good times before and have done a lot of things that were enjoyable, but this one was a good trip. A bit short, I should have planned for 10 days instead of 7, but we were busy the whole time and were doing things constantly, even if part of it was driving back and forth. A good trip. I guess it is up to the others to say how good, but I had fun. And I haven't even talked about the next day. Maybe I should have put this paragraph at the end of the next entry. I probably will, so memorize it now and play it back again later.
But until next time, that's all for now.
Later
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