This is a vacation of firsts. It’s our first time in the Southern Hemisphere. Our first time across the date line. Our first time driving on the left side of the road. Our first time walking boldly each to the wrong side of the car, only to have to sheepishly switch places. Our first time navigating a traffic circle. Our first time charting a new path on the fly after being spun out of a traffic circle in entirely the wrong direction.

We drive from Auckland airport to Waitomo. The journey involves 10 minutes of looking for the rental car trunk release, 60 seconds of looking for a way to shut off the rental car alarm triggered while looking for the trunk release, and 3.5 hours of driving, including approximately 358 roundabouts. It is a dizzying journey. It includes an unexpected scenic tour of Hamilton, thanks to roundabout #63. I start to get the hang of the driving, except that I turn on the windshield wipers every time I go to make a left turn. I would turn on the windshield wipers every time I go to make a right turn as well, except that the “off” position for the windshield is as far right as the stick goes. Right turns will thus only be a problem only on rainy days.

We arrive at the Waitomo Caves Hotel in the late afternoon. It’s a beautiful old hotel from the early 1900s, but it’s in a state of disrepair, especially when it comes to our room. Peeling wallpaper and threadbare carpets, along with some horrific pink particleboard furniture that really hasn’t held up well. The effect is a bit creepy (a la The Shining). But the place is clean, and has a tasty restaurant, so we’re okay.

The next morning we get up and do our Blackwater rafting tour This involves donning wet suits and helmets with miners’ lamps on them and following an underground stream, scrambling over rocks, floating on inner tubes, and jumping off a waterfall. The caves have glowworms, which appear as specks of light at the ceiling of the cave that form a sort of starscape. It’s all very romantic, except when the guides accurately identify glowworms as “shagging maggots with shiny shit”. Accurate, but somewhat off putting.

The tour is reasonably athletic, if only because climbing over wet rocks in a wet suit and goofy boots is exceedingly awkward. But (after a brief break for lunch), Dave and I elect to take the Waitomo Walkway, which winds through farmland and lush forest to arrive at the same caves that we navigated earlier in the day. The walk is spectacular, with great views and a couple of exciting close encounters with mean looking gangs of cows, but it’s three hours round trip and up and down hills, and we started out tired. By the time we make our way back to the hotel, I nearly burst into tears over the fact that our room is on the second floor. There are lots of pictures from the first half of the hike, when it was more a relaxing excursion and less a horrible forced march.