For the final week that the family stayed in Auckland, Aleah and my friend, Miriam, came to visit us. She is super into Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, so one of the must do activities was to visit Hobbiton. It was far enough away from our Airbnb that we made an overnight trip of it, with Hobbiton being on the second day. Mom and Dad planned a kayak trip to see glow worms the day before Hobbiton, and I absolutely loved it, so naturally decided to cover that in this post. The very beginning of the tour was fairly simple, some basic advice on how to handle a kayak, which I don’t think any of us needed, but was understandable given that kayak experience was not a requirement for the trip. Our guide gave us a brief overview of the tour, then asked who would be in which kayak. I opted to be in a solo kayak, with Mom and Dad sharing one, Aleah and Miriam in a second, and a couple from California in the third double, bringing us to five kayaks including the guide.
After getting in the water, we had a short and enjoyable paddle to a small stream which briefly separated from the main river before joining it again. While in that offshoot, our guide told us a bit about a power plant that had been here until 1949, when flooding made it too much work to keep using obsolete equipment. Usually small traces of the operation could be seen poking above the water, but since the water level was so high we were not granted the chance to see some of the tennis courts of the abandoned, flooded town.
After more paddling, a few more stops to talk about the power plant, and some of the wildlife, we arrived at a river mouth. The area we would be paddling through was almost entirely native plants. I thought it was pretty bland looking from the outside, and for a sec I was unimpressed. That changed as soon as we paddled around the bend of the small canyon, and I was blown away by the lush vegetation and sheer walls of this tiny slice of the past. If our guide had said that he had invented time travel and had suddenly brought us back 400 million years, when animals first began to explore the land, I might have believed him, if only for a few seconds. Words honestly cannot do justice to how much I loved paddling through this serene slice of the past.
After that experience, we beached our kayaks in a clearing to wait for dark. Our guide got out a snack and delicious drink for us to have while he told us facts about the glow worms. Most of them we had already learned while in the caves while black water rafting, but there were a few cool new facts. For example, in the caves the glow worm’s strings can be several feet, while they are much shorter in the woods. Also, I don’t think this is likely true of the cave glow worms, but in the forest the primary food source of the glow worms are moths.
Eventually, it got dark enough that we would be able to see the glow worms, so our guide had us all get in a line, with him at the front and me in the back. Since it was dark, the experience of seeing the vegetation was reduced, but the glow worms more than made up for it. When they hatch, they don’t move far from where the eggs were laid, but they get away from their siblings lest they become sibling food. As a result of this movement, the glow worms commonly end up in a spiral formation. When their bioluminescence becomes visible at night they look like mini galaxy spirals in the rocks and trees. The night got so dark it began to get difficult to tell what was star and what was worm. The experience was wonderful, and over way too fast, although with how often I kept bumping Aleah and Miriam, who were in front of me, I imagine they were at least a little glad to get out of the tiny chasm, and into somewhere with a bit more space.
What an amazing experience!