Travel from Hobbiton to Waitomo, New Zealand took us through gorgeous rolling hills of farmland. It's really easy to see why Peter Jackson selected that part of the country to depict the shire. Even though we are here in the late fall, everything was green and lush.
And I don't know why, but fat, grazing sheep always comfort me. (Wierd fact: Jackson thought that these sheep - and there are 130,000 of them on the farm that hosts Hobbiton alone - looked too modern. So he brought all of the farm animals in from elsewhere for the making of the movies.)
There are outcroppings of tall rocks periodically tucked amid round green humps. We found out that these formations are actually parts of cave structures which pervade the area. And that is why we went to Waitomo.
Waitomo is the home of many accessible caves, some of which can be explored in the dark, via adventure crawling and rafting. In the dark. But let me get back to discussing something we were willing to do.
We didn't have much time, so just went to the iconic Waitomo Glowworm Caves. Glowworms are pupae of a kind of fly. In addition to glowing, the create and hang sticky strings. Newly hatched insects instinctively fly toward the sky. When they hatch in these caves, they see what they think is a starry sky and fly right into the glowworm traps.
The caves were jointly discovered by a Maori man and his white friend. Many of the descendents of those two men still run the tourist attraction. Our guide, who really knew her stuff, was the great, great grandaughter of the Maori man. Very cool.
Funny moment: Since we are traveling during the off-season, we get to connect more with locals, who exceed our expectations for being kind and welcoming. While we ate dinner at our backpacker-stay lodge, a crusty old guy came up to us, barely able to contain himself. He said, "Do you want to see a big wild boar? My friend shot one. He gored two of our dogs in the fight." We looked at each other, said okay and followed him out to an offroad pickup truck. Sure enough. There was a big, tusky boar. It was very dark out, but we oohed and aahed appreciatively. He beamed and said, "Well, not everyone is okay with this kind of thing. But he is amazing, isn't he?"
Also found out that Kihikihi (the name of a town we passed through) means cicada in Maori, as evidenced by local statuary.
No comments:
Post a Comment