A Wet and Wild Caving Experience

Waitomo, New Zealand
By Marisa Umsawasdi

I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. I just knew that I liked abseiling (rappelling), and I liked caves and exploring karst topography landscapes. The other activities in Waitomo – floating down a stream to look at glow worms or Lost World (one big abseil) – didn’t sound adventurous enough for me. So I signed up to do the 4 hour Haggas Honking Holes caving adventure.

My group consisted of 2 Canadians, 2 Brits, a German guy, and me. We met our guide, who drove us to a quiet piece of farmland. He took us to a barn onsite and gave us our equipment – wetsuit, harness, helmet, headlamp, and white gum boots. Then we walked over to a tree next to a small cliff, where we were given the abseiling instructions. We used an aspiring abseil rack as our abseil device – something I wasn’t familiar with using. No one in the group, except for me, had any abseiling experience. It was only a few meters anyways, so it was a breeze.

To enter the cave, you must abseil down into a black hole – that’s what it looks like from the top. You can’t see how far you have to go, either, until you see the lamps of those who have abseiled before you. The abseil into the entrance was nice and easy, but pretty daunting to those unexperienced. It was about a 30 meter abseil down to the first chamber.

The next two abseils were down waterfalls. The guide tricked us to start abseiling on a particular side of the hole so that we would get completely drenched. The frigid water pounded on my hardhat, down my
wetsuit, and in my boots. I don’t even know how I caught my breath going down, but it seemed to go pretty quickly. When I got to the bottom, unhooked and everything, I took off my gum boots to empty
them. I couldn’t really walk with them on as they were full to the brim!

The bottom was pretty much a running underground river, though walkable. We followed the flow of the water. The space got smaller
and smaller. Then we went, one-by-one, through a tiny space. I was crawling on my hands and knees, had to tilt my head to breathe in the little air pocket, water up to my cheek. It was a short crawl, which
opened up to a chamber. We admired the stalactites and stalagmites surrounding us.

Along the trip, we turned off all of our headlamps, listened to the silence, and looked up at the glowworms. We also did quite a bit of crawling, swimming in the underground river, rock climbing in gum boots, and climbing up rickety ladders.

At the end, we did a rock climb on the slippery rock. The guide didn’t think I was tall enough to get the first move, so he gave me a boost. I think it was just an excuse to touch my butt.

Ironically enough, the climb out of the cave and hike back to the van was more tedious than the 4 hours of caving, itself!

For more information on caving in Waitomo, check out Haggas Honking Holes.