Day 31- March 8th
We left Sheeshao with the owner’s and drove into the Legendary Blackwater Rafting Co. office. We all got into wetsuits, boots, and helmets and got in a van. We had two guides, Lucy/Turtle and Aaron, and about 12 other people, including us.
We stopped at a little stream where we got inner tubes. We had to make sure that they fit our “bums” and then took a picture. We then jumped into a little stream backwards. We would have to jump off of some waterfalls later, so we had to practice.
We drove over to the cave, and then crawled through an opening in the rock. This was the start of the tour. They told us a bit about the cave, called Ruakuri Cave. Supposedly a Maori tribe had been hunting two dogs and found a whole pack of them hidden in the entrance to the cave. The killed all of the dogs and had hot dogs for a week. Ruakuri means something like two dogs, or den of dogs.
We walked along the rock for a ways, and then floated in our tubes. There was one spot where there was only about a foot of air above the water, so we had to lay flat on our inner tubes and pull ourselves along by our fingers on the cave ceiling. The water was only a meter deep at most, and the cave was about a meter-3 meters wide. We floated for a ways, then got out and walked, then floated again, using our headlamps. We stopped to see glowworms on the top of a tunnel. The glowworms are actually fly larvae or maggots. The glowing part is actually a chemical reaction of their poop, which is still inside of them. They just call them glowworms because not many people would come to see the bioluminescent poop of maggots.
The water wasn’t too cold for me, but for a lot of the people who weren’t from Alaska it was really cold. We had to jump off of two waterfalls, one about a foot high, the other about a meter high. If we didn’t jump far enough, we would hit the rock ledge underneath. It was a lot easier than it sounds, except for the landing, when you get water in your face and mouth.
At the end we turned off all of our lights and floated out, watching the glowworms on the ceiling 10 meters above us. It looked almost like stars, except they were three dimensional as you floated past. We all climbed out and took another picture, then headed back to the van. We got out of our wetsuits and had hot soup and bagels (everyone besides me, anyway). We bought a CD with all of the pictures the guides had taken and a T-Shirt for me.
Later that evening we went out to the same area and went on the Ruakuri Bushwalk. The owners’ daughter, Pippin, came with us and gave us a tour. Since her parents work for the Black Water rafting company, she knew a lot about it. We got to go down into some small caves along the trail and see the glowworms along the trail.
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