Waitomo caves, glow worms

I have never seen a glowworm before, neither did I know what it was. But they have plenty of those in Waitomo, New Zealand. To see them however, one has to traverse underground somehow, to some of New Zealands largest tunnel systems so far explored.
Actually what sounded the most interesting was the name, Black Water Rafting, now imagine river rafting underground in dark caves? Ha, doesn't get much cooler than that! I checked their webpage where it said that booking was very much needed, because it was sold out all the time. The system didn't let me book because there was not time enough to verify if there was a spot. So I called at 20:30 the day before I wanted to go and got on the 11 o'clock group. Asked if I could pay online and save 10%, which was their discounted price. No, now that I had called them the booking offer on the Internet was not valid anymore. Of course!
I arrived early in the morning, plenty of time to buy some breakfast before the trip would start. We got a small briefing of what was about to happen and started gearing up. Wetsuits for everyone, helmets, gumboots and abseiling harness on top of that. I was told to leave my fancy waterproof camera behind, company policy didn't allow to take pictures. I had the feeling they just wanted to make some more money off of me, but they brought a camera, so they would at least take some pictures and some good ones...
We were then driven out into the jungle and stopped at a training facility for abseiling, rappelling or whatever you want to call it. Familiar with the equipment we were ready to drop into the cave system by lowering ourselves into a small hole in the ground and some 30 meters down. It was quite tight to get through the cave entry and I was thinking that this might not be such a good idea afterall, what if I get stuck underground???
Got to the bottom in one piece and was finally ready to explore the underground cave system... Well, kind of.

We walked for about 1 minute, then there was a zip line to get us into the next section of the cave. That lasted for around 7 seconds in total dark. The first time we could see the glow worms now, they were everywhere. Landed in a bigger cave and there we said down to get some hot chocolate, because now we needed some warmth? We were then given a big inflated rubber tube and told to jump into the water with that thing. Awesome, now the black water rafting is about to begin, cool :-)
Jumped in the water and felt no current, oh well, we could hear some waterfalls just around the corner. In the water they then asked us to pull ourselves in through the caves with a rope attached to the wall. 5 minutes later the rope ended and now we had to paddle the rest of the way, felt good to move because the water was pretty cold. After paddling for 10 min we could hear another waterfall, yeah, now the action starts soon, yeah!
It did, we hooked up all the rubber rings in one long snake kind of formation and then we were ready... To float back the same way we had come in an insane speed of... almost not moving! We were literally laying on our backs watching the glow worms grow old, right in front of us. The guide had to be paddling for the entire group in front to make us move at all. Not what I had expected for sure. This lasted maybe 30-60min, no sure, but it was long a cold just to sit there and do nothing.
At the end where we jumped in, we returned the tubes and continued around the corner on foot. Now it was time to return to the real outside world. We walked to the waterfall, where they had built a slide for us, about 4 meters long and half a meter down. Went head first, what a rush, hahaha
Afterwards we went through some caves pretty low at some points so had to crawl, and finally ascended through a few waterfalls to the surface again. The climbing through the water fall was by far the most fun and challenging, but then again, this was designed so that most people could do it.
Back at the office again, it was time for a shower and then we got some hot soup as well with a bagel. As I suspected, we could now buy the pictures they had taken for $20 on a CD. I didn't have a CD drive and asked if they could just copy it onto my memory card instead, but no way, it could be full of viruses. Could they send it in email to me? No, then they had to do it for everyone. I got a little annoyed and wasn't going to buy them then, that's when one of the other participants, Greg, offered to email the photos of me, very nice man! Thanks
I would think twice before going on a $200+ rafting trip in these caves. You have to have a real interest in glow worms or something to think it is super exciting, I was quite bored. And it lasted for 5 hours from beginning till end, with 10-15 minutes of action... But they served a good cake in the cave! haha