Oh! One thing I forgot to write about the night before was that on our way to rainbow Falls and on our way back from rainbow Falls, we got stopped by the police to do random breathalyzer testing. Chase was driving, so he got the honor of counting to 10 into the breathalyzer each way, and we got the same cop both times going different directions, so he recognized us coming back out of Rainbow Falls. 🙃
Anyway, morning came again at Whangarei Falls where we spent the night. I spent a little time in the morning. Meditating and of course writing the blog posts that I published a couple days ago. Nothing fancy.
I did, however, run into a fairly irritating problem: and perhaps you can learn from my mistakes. Never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever by 100% deep bug juice unless you plan on carrying it in a completely water type syllable Tupperware container because every single time I have bought that kind of bug juice, it is leaked out of its container, and this time I even put it in a plastic bag just to be safe, and it leaked out of the container out of the plastic bag and all over part of my rather expensive backpack. Backpack. Wouldn’t think that it would be that big of a deal, Just wipe it off or wash it off or whatever, but the problem is this stuff eats through the backpack material. I’ve had it ruin one backpack already, and it started eating away at the backpack material on this one as well.
Makes you wonder if it’s eating away backpacks if I should even be putting it on my skin at all!!! 😬
So, I know it’s super helpful in really insect-ridden areas, but it takes one heck of a special precaution to make it so that it will transport well without damaging the gear you’re taking with you.
After washing my bag with soap and water for a little while, and cleaning everything out, Chase and I headed over to Abby Caves. On the way, we had our third and final episode of Apple Maps being Apple Maps. It told us to turn right, and we turned right, and then until this to do a U-turn because it did told us to go the wrong direction, and then it changed and send us all the way back the other way… Anyway, that third screw up was enough for Chase to finally download Google Maps onto his Apple phone.
So here’s our love letter to Apple:
Dear Apple, You have fabulous cameras, But what good are they if we can’t even get to the places we’re trying to take pictures of? Maybe you should start a new product line. Banana. Then you can secretly just use Google maps and still have great cameras, and everyone’s happy.
Well, except that we realized today that Chase’s fruit phone can’t do full 360° pictures like my robot phone can. 🙃
Anyway…the Abbey Cave system is made up of three differently named caves, but there are even more than that because we did some exploring and entered a fourth cave and wandered around it for a while before we called it a day. 😁
So we kind of did the caves out of order, but as with much of the rest of our trip to this point, it turned out better than planned. 🥳
We started out in Middle Cave, which had some really awesome glow worm rooms where you could turn your headlamps off and just look up at the ceiling and see the glow worms, which, in the dark black of the cave, look like stars on the top of the cave. Super cool looking! 😊 There were stalactites and stalagmites everywhere in all of the caves, and several places where they had formed from the top all the way to the bottom and joined together. Honestly, there were a whole ton of different kinds of mineral formations. It was wonderful. 😊
It was raining a bit on and off while we were in the caves, which probably wasn’t the smartest, as we saw signs of flash floods inside the caves, with debris wedged as many as maybe 20+ feet above is. 😬 Nutty! But we had a blast, and there wasn’t any issue with extra water in the caves despite the little bit of rain that was happening outside.
😅
The second cave we went into was Ivy Cave, and that was probably the most adventure-providing cave of the four that we went through. There were some bigger rooms, and there was a spot where we had to wade in water up to our waists and even chests for a while through a very long tunnel that was obviously completely full of water.
When we got to the end of ivy cave, I… turned around and went back, having seen a place a good ways back where we could go up through the tunnel via the ceiling -ish and explore further 🙃. So we went back through the tunnel that was full of water, and managed to scramble up the side of the cave wall. It was probably about a 15 ft or so foot scramble. We spent a good little while exploring all sorts of new tunnels and passageways, and then, just as we were about to leave, I noticed another passageway, a small one, and decided to explore it. 😎
So Chase and I started following this tunnel that went up and around and up and around some more until it turned very much into what I used to experience in Nutty Putty caves in Utah. We even had a little section that I nicknamed the New Zealand Birth Canal, reminiscent of a section of the cave with the same name in Nutty Putty Caves.
Lots of memories of Nutty Putty Caves have come back because of the experiences in Ivy Cave.
Anyway it was a lot of fun. 🙂
The very end of that section of the cave turned into a little teeny tiny room that was just filled with stalactites and stalagmites, with many of them joined from top to bottom (don’t know if those have names 🙃). We spent a little while in there, taking pictures and videos and whatnot before heading out of Ivy Cave.
After that, we went to the 3rd cave (Organ Cave, and you can thank Chase for my being able to write the names of the caves, as the only one I could remember was Middle Cave 🙃).
Anyway, one of the reasons why I was glad that we did the caves in the order that we did them was because of what we found when we got to Organ Cave. Middle cave had some really awesome glow worms, but after only probably 100 or 150 ft into Organ, with the faint glow of the entrance still visible, I found my self in a decent sized room, and Chase and I turned off our headlamps, looked up, and with jaws figuratively dropped and eyes wide open, we found ourselves just mesmerized by how many glow worms there were in that particular room of that particular cave and how beautiful it was. It was simply incredible. We stared up in awe and just… sitting there and expressing over and over and over again how awesome it was.
Interestingly, the longer we sat there the better it got! After probably 15 or 20 minutes, no joke, there was with light from the glow worms for our eyes to get accustomed enough that we were able to see our arms and hands in front of us. It was super faint and hard to see, but we could actually see our arms in front of us!
At about that point, I remember looking off to my left back toward the opening of the cave and then looking back at the glow worms and being just blown away at how bright they were. It was just incredible. 🤯
There was one more room in that cave that was almost as amazing as that first one, and we stayed in that one for a few minutes or so. Probably. After that, we continued on through the cave, coming to some pretty huge rooms, the biggest being probably about the size of an entire house. On the way back, I split off on a side tunnel that ended up being a lot like ivy cave, in that there was a tunnel that was just completely full of water that went waste or so deep. I followed it for quite a ways until it dead ended into a room that was just full of water, which meant that the cave continued, but I would have had to have gone under the water to go under the wall wherever the water was coming through, and I wasn’t up for that kind of danger. Danger. I didn’t have the gear to make it anywhere near possible to do safely. So I headed back to where I had left Chase, we left that cave, but not before. I slipped climbing up a particular section and smashed my shin. Pretty good. Fortunately, shins hurt a heck of a lot even without a lot of damage, and that was my experience. This time. I’ve got a nice scraped up spot, but no lasting damage.
After we left that cave, we thought we were done, but as we were walking around, we noticed the entrance, or quasi entrance, to yet another cave. Another cave. We wandered inside by squeezing through a hole that was a lot smaller than any of the entrances to the other caves but still quite easy to go through. We followed that cave for probably 100 yards or so twisting and turning around in different places before finding that the cave once again disappeared behind rocks. That weren’t safe to try and go through, so we found an exit near the end where we had been and crawled out. We had a heck of a lot of fun going through those caves, and the rain outside never got bad enough to be dangerous inside, though we probably never would have known whether it was dangerous or not outside.
When we got back to our car we noticed there were a couple of girls who had pulled in and who saw us walking up all covered in clay from dragging ourselves through ivy Cave. They were German girls who had come over after graduating school, and they were spending something like 8 months traveling. Traveling. 6 months in New Zealand, one month in Bali, and one month in Thailand before heading back to Germany. Made some suggestions for what they might want to do. They only had one head lamp and just regular tennis shoes, and Chase and I had gone through the cave with water shoes. Totally doable in tennis shoes, but obviously you’re going to get your shoes soaking wet.
Anyway, as they were about to leave to go to the cave, we gave them one of our headlamps so they wouldn’t be trying to do the cave with just one headlamp, is that would really really not be good. They were quite appreciative and headed out on their little expedition.
Meanwhile, Chase and I stayed there at the parking place. Just sort of talking and relaxing and cleaning up a bit, and eating a late lunch. We ended up hanging out there for so long that just as we were about ready to drive away. The German girls came back from their little expedition, one of them running up to us as we were close to pulling out of the parking lot and giving us our headlamp back and thanking us for it as it had made a big difference for them in the cave. We ended up chatting with the girls for probably an hour or so and then taking them out to eat at a Domino’s Pizza in Whangarei before giving them a bar of biodegradable soap to make it easier for them, as they were wondering how and where to shower. Time living in my car in previous years, biodegradable soap and a waterfall work great, so I made that suggestion and they were grateful for the bar of soap.
We bid them farewell for the night, and Chase and I popped in the car and headed south planning to get to a famous gorge and also Hobbiton the next day. We drove and drove and drove, had more map problems, but they weren’t Apple map related problems. They were Stephen related problems. Then we found a little spot on the side of the highway that was sort of a big dirt parking area, and we decided to bed down there for the night.
Abby caves and enjoying the company of the German girls was the highlight of the day. We had a blast both in the caves and chatting with the girls, who had a lot of fun laughing at us while we tried to pronounce German words that they wanted us to try and pronounce. 🙃
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 