New Zealand Day One - May 24th, 2009 (Part One)

The sun came up on a VERY adventurous day!!

We were picked up by the car rental van from the Auckland airport and were promptly shuttled off to their office a few kilometers away (yes, we're using the metric system now!). We showed them our licenses, signed the papers, got the key, and loaded up our bags and the rented camping equipment into the trunk and back seats.

Adventure 1: Melissa learns how to drive on the left side of the road, while sitting on the right side of the car. It was... interesting! The smaller roads were more difficult to maneuver at first, but once we got out on the divided highway leaving Auckland it really wasn't that different. Although Ashley and I did help each other navigate the tricky right-hand turns and round abouts throughout the entire week!

We drove South for the next couple of hours and ended up in Waitomo (Wy-toe-mo) with the sky drizzling around us. It was cold, and we were about to get colder - by choice! We once again found ourselves signing our lives away, and then went to grab our swimming suits from the car.

Adventure 2: Black Water Rafting! We donned our swimming suits, were squeezed into pre-dampened wetsuits (I doubt they ever get the chance to dry...), and grabbed a helmet complete with headlamp. We were ready to roll!

The entire crew piled into a van and we headed to the river. We picked out an innertube that fit around our hineys (we're on the left), sat on the ground to practice a chain formation that we needed to use while on the water, and were instructed how to jump off of the waterfalls... and then had to try it by jumping off the dock into the freezing water.

Being the smart mouth I am I requested that a "tough guy" be the first to jump off the dock, but the guides just laughed and made me go first.

This was just to get wet however... we needed to re-douse our wetsuits in order to heat them up with our body heat before taking the real plunge. We once again piled into the van with our innertubes in tow this time, and drove further upstream to the starting point - the entrance to "Two Dog Cave." We crawled down through the opening and spent the next couple of hours winding down the river in the watery blackness, floating under low ceilings you could scrape your nose on, jumping off the promised waterfalls, admiring the glow worms and hoping to avoid any encounters with the other local cave dwellers... you know, large creepy spiders, eels.

We made it out alive, with cold hands and toes, but happy.