There is no dark like the deep, dark of underground.

Sitting in the boat, gently rocking from side to side I remembered the deep dark of other caves, on other continents. We hiked deep into the bowels of Carlsbad Caverns and jumped when our guide shrieked in the echoing black. Of course there was my infamous adventure in the Niah Caves on Borneo; we won’t mention that! But never have we been in a cave quite like the glowworm cave in Waitomo.

What makes this cave special?

It has it’s very own milky way, deep below the hillside.

We’ve seen glowworms elsewhere in New Zealand, we’re actively hunting them at night, now that we know what to look for; and you certainly don’t have to take a tour to find them. But the caves at Waitomo allow a viewing that you won’t quite get any other way.

They are the carnivorous larvae of a fly with no mouth. The fly mates, lays its eggs, they hatch and the larvae (the glowworm) lives for 10 months; eating for nine of those. What do they eat? Mosquitos or other small flying insects that enter the dark, are attracted to the glow, and get tangled in the sticky strings that it secretes. Sometimes, they even eat the flies that they will soon become! It’s a macabre scene, but a beautiful one, shimmering blue in a subterranean midnight.

It has secretly been on my list of must-dos in New Zealand since my friend mentioned that it was his favourite when he was here years ago. I love revisiting the haunts of my friends’ ghosts and sitting in the dark awhile with someone where the threads of lives and worlds overlap.

It was a surreal moment:

Gently floating on the inky black of a river in the belly of the world, listening to a chorale of voices, in the caverns above us, as another group sang lustily into the cathedral arch of a limestone chamber. It was like hearing heaven, from the bowels of somewhere below.

And then, without warning, Golum’s voice tore the silence, singing:

“The rocks in the pool are nice and cool…. so juicy sweeeeet!!” Then silence, before: “If it loses, we eats it whole, Precious!”

Hannah strikes again! Her Golum impersonation is masterful. The spell was broken, even the glowworms seemed to laugh.

We had to run to make it from the glowworm cave to meet our guide, Mark, at the entrance of the Aranui Cave, about 3 km down the road in time for the one o’clock tour Karen had so generously arranged for us. If you’re looking for a natural cave with spectacular speleothems, this is one to see. It’s limestone interior looks like it’s been formed by melted wax, dripped into fantastic shapes that cast shadows into the layers imagination for centuries.

Mark’s deep, resonant voice echoed as he told us the story of the Maori boy, Aranui, who found the cave whilst chasing a pig and then of Maui and his legendary brothers who fished from the canoe of the South Island and hauled the leviathan of the North Island out of the cold, watery depths of an ancient Southern Ocean. The speleothems listened patiently and didn’t correct the thousand year old stories, even though their millennia of experience certainly told a different tale of how these islands came to be. New Zealand might be the newest country on earth, but that doesn’t mean she’s young.

If you make it to this corner of the world, take a boat ride on the underground river for us, look up at the star filled, carnivorous “sky” and whisper hello to our ghosts.