You already know about this day a little bit, as it’s the day that I started trying to catch up from being so far behind on my journal entries.
We woke up in the morning in the upper parking lot of the aranui caves hiking/walking/tourist area.
As it was early, like usual, I took the time to start dictating my catch up posts, only completing one, as it took a lot longer than I expected it to, which meant that I didn’t get caught up at all for the day. 🙃
After eating a little bit I think, and getting ourselves prepared for a long Trek underground, Chase and I started down the path. The very first stop was the bridge across the river where the tour groups go, but we weren’t going to do that. We were on the hunt for the hidden cave that almost nobody else knows about.
All we had to find the cave, though, were some fairly nonspecific instructions for finding it. Go down the stairs, turn right into the bush, keep the river on the left and the hill on your right, turn right around some sandstone pillars, and there you would see the cave.
Well, we looked and looked, wandering all over the place, but we were coming up empty handed.
After a decent amount of time exploring different possible cave sites, i sent a message to Emma who’d pointed the cave out to us, crossing my fingers she’d get the message quickly and be able to help us find it.
Gratefully, it wasn’t but a few minutes later, or so, that she replied, and very patiently spend probably 15 minutes or more trying to help us find the entrance.
In the end, chase found it, a hole in the rock just a couple of dozen feet off the river with an ice-cold stream rushing out of it.
As caves go, this was a pretty long one. I think Emma said that it had something like 10 or 12 km of total passages underground. We were entering one of many possible entrances to the cave, apparently. The one we entered being called the downstream entrance.
It was a fun little cave, but it wasn’t a super exciting cave. We didn’t have the equipment to go up to the upper levels and actually do much exploring. It would have been foolhardy to try and climb the 20 or 30 foot cliffs that it would take to get up to the upper levels. They weren’t good hand or footholds, and neither of us being experienced rock climbers, it just wasn’t smart. So we stuck to the lower passages, which pretty much were just one long passage.
There were some pretty cool spots inside, though. There were a couple of places that were almost like silos, cylindrical rooms with the cave ceilings way high above our heads.
Toward the end of the cave, we came to a small underground waterfall. 😁
That was super cool to me.
Chase stayed at the waterfall because trying to get past it would likely soak you with pretty cold water, and being far underground where it’s already… not warm… And already being wet on the bottom half… the prospect of getting colder wasn’t so appealing.
I being… yeah, anyway. 🙃
I wanted to keep going to see where the cave went from there, so i shimmied up the side of the cave until I could scooch myself over the main part of the falls that was going to soak me if I tried to pass it below.
The result of my efforts was getting only a few splashes on me instead of getting soaked. I shimmied down the other side of the waterfall, told Chase i was going to keep going a little ways, and then come back.
Continuing along the cave, the walls got closer and closer together until there was no more regular bedrock–the walls being a solid mass of mineral deposits.
That was really cool looking.
It’s funny how, to see the deposits all shiny and slippery looking, they are actually more like sandpaper every you touch them–and extremely hard.
After getting to a section where to keep going I’d need to get on my belly and nearly submerge myself in the water to crawl underneath to keep going, I decided i would end there and go back to Chase.
On the way back out of the cave, Chase said something that was trying to be helpful, but it tripped my pride bone pretty hard. There had been a pattern of behavior that was bothering me that i hadn’t really talked about to Chase (nothing really wrong with Chase at all, just something that poked holes in my pride and started festering.
What he said in the cave was sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back for be.
Honestly, it was pretty innocuous, and he was just trying to help, but I’d let things build up until I snapped.
I didn’t say anything to him, but i snapped and was pissed.
Stupid pride.
I didn’t want to confront him, but being pissed, i didn’t want to be there either, so I started going ahead at a fast pace, much faster than he was comfortable going, leaving him quite far behind.
At one point, i held back, waiting for him to make sure he was ok. But then as soon as i saw his light, I was off like a shot again.
This time, though, I was going so fast and got turned around, and went the wrong way for a minute or so, which was a blow to my pride yet again. I won’t go into it all because it involves Chase. The most important thing to take away from this is that Chase was just sincerely trying to help, and i got butt hurt over it.
Anyway, Chase caught up and passed me, not knowing I was still there, so he got out first.
I was frustrated/angry and not ready to talk, do i just walked back to the car mostly quietly.
Gratefully, Chase being who he is, just a couple minutes after getting back to the car, he confronted me to figure out why on Earth I was angry. We talked about it for a little while, and everything was good after that. He’s such a good guy. Wish I were further along in my personal development than I am at age nearly 41 now. 🙃
Kind of sad how many issues I have. 😬🙃
After getting everything figured out between us, we decided to go back and do some more exploring. We went down into a cave that was absolutely massive that the whole river went into, thinking that it was one of the caves that people took tours in, but it turned out that it just looped around and came back out after her only probably a couple 100 yards or so. Huge huge cave, though.
We also found another cave that had a cavers gate at the beginning of it. Thing was, though, the gate had been left unlocked. 🙃
Oops.
Well, having returned my conscience more toward its proper place, I didn’t go exploring like I might have. We just went ahead and left everything alone and didn’t go beyond the gate.
We did, however, in the small section of cave that we were able to access, see cave crickets that were bigger than anything I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I’ve seen cave crickets before, but they’ve pretty much been about the same size as regular crickets.
Nope! Not these! There was one cave cricket that when it’s legs were all extended, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the size of both of my hands put side by side together. It was absolutely massive.
A cave cricket! 😶
We wandered around a little bit more but didn’t run into anything of note after that.
After that, we started heading toward Waikawau Tunnel Beach, which was our next destination. We stopped off at a waterfall along the way, but we’d seen so many waterfalls that this one didn’t really compare.
We also passed another one of the Lord of the rings filming locations, or maybe it was the hobbit. I don’t remember. it was closed, and we wouldn’t really have stopped anyway.
The drive out to the tunnel Beach was one of my favorites, if not my favorite of the whole trip. It was about 100 km long in total distance on two different roads. The road itself was pretty much only one lane wide with a crap ton of turns as you’re going through mountains.
So it was extremely important to take every curve quite slowly. That resulted in a very long drive, but I loved the scenery, and I loved being way out in the middle of nowhere. We also ran across a couple of hedgehogs that had come out at dusk or night.
The first hedgehog wouldn’t get out of the way. As I was driving along I saw it moving in the middle of our one lane road, and it just stopped instead of running the rest of the way off the road. It’s like it completely froze with fear. I went over to it, but it looked rather menacing from the back and with all of its spikes pointed everywhere. I didn’t know if hedgehogs were like porcupines where they could leave their little spiky things in you, so I asked Chase and he said they were not.
That said, even though hedgehogs don’t send their needles into you like porcupines, when I went to pick up the hedgehog, the spines were sharp enough to puncture my skin, at least one needle going into the palm of my right hand as I picked it up and carried it over to the edge of the road.
Cute little things, but I think it was absolutely terrified of me, is it just froze and wouldn’t move. I had to sort of push it along with a stick and finally picked it up and moved it off the road.
We arrived at tunnel beach after 100 km or so of the windy one lane road, having not come across a single other car in either direction on the entire drive and having increased in altitude from wherever the heck we were up to over 1600 meters and then back down to sea level.
It was a gorgeous drive while it was still light, the clouds blanketing the mountaintops and the valleys and whatnot.
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 