Big Trip

Had a lie-in this morning, and treated ourselves to a day just pottering around Te Anau. Blogged some more, checked email, had lunch, that kind of thing. Determined that there's nothing in the souvenir shops worth buying, too. Lovely walk by the side of the lake, very scenic. The problem with all this scenery is that it's hard to photograph and hard to describe, so please accept my apologies for repeated definition of scenery as 'scenic' or 'lovely'.
Late afternoon, we headed down for our trip to the glow worm caves on the other side of the lake. After a short boat trip along the lake, we were at the cave entrance. There was a cheesy, but mercifully short, slide show about the caves which I think just filled in time while the guides were getting themselves organised. Then we were sorted into boatloads of about 12 people, and then went out a boatload at a time.
The walk into the caves is amazing. Very low headroom in places, and the stream rushing out of the caves past us all the time. It was really very noisy. We walked up to the first boat departure point, and one notable feature of the caves was the absence of stalagmites or stalactites. The caves are only about 12000 years old, so there's been no time for them to form yet. There were a few blue dots, rather like blue LEDs on the roof of the cave - our first sight of glow worms. Actually they're not glow worms at all, they're fly larvae who produce a blue bioluminescent glow to attract insects, which they catch on long mucousy strands and eat.
The boat, a tin tub propelled by the guide pulling us along a cable on the roof, took us further up the cave past a collection of round boulders and up to another walkway. This was the highest part of the cave roof at around 70 feet. The roar of the water was pretty deafening by this point, and we soon found out why as we reached the waterfall that was producing it. There was a lot of water in a small space. At the next boat departure point we had to keep quiet. Above the waterfall things were a lot more peaceful. We were taken into a pitch black section of cave, where the glow worms were all over the place. It was very disorientating. There were hundreds of little blue LEDs of different intensity (the brightness depends on how hungry the larvva is - the hungrier, the brighter, the more likely to attract an insect to eat). The gooey strings were just about visible, too.
We returned whence we came, by the same route, to be attacked by sandflies as we waited for the return launch. This was more of a surprise to me than the others, I think, as I so rarely get bitten by anything, but sandflies are obviously hungry little devils.
Another great trip. I think the sheer rawness of the caves, the fact that the water is still rushing through and changing them, and the absence of guides trying to impose human shapes on stalagmites ("...and here we see the madonna with child, elephant and rhinoceros...") made the whole thing more enjoyable.