No one reads a travel blog to hear the horror stories of the plane ride, so I’ll spare you the details and suffice to say, it was as bad as it was long! The biggest issue was we lost two hours prior to take off when a bag made it to the plane without a person, which meant we had to wait for either the person to show up or for the bag to be found and removed. We waited.

We hit the ground running to try and make up for the lost hours. Ashish did a fabulous job of taking the first driving shift, all of us helpfully yelling “tight left, wide right” whenever he’d make a turn. We drove north for about 3 hrs to get to the Trounson Kauri Park. The Kauri trees are huge and produce sap that trapped insects, which later became amber, so basically Jurassic Park! Walking the boardwalk (created to protect the delicate feeder roots of the giant trees), it totally felt like a dinosaur could appear. Leaving Indiana with snow on the ground and then 21 hrs later walking in a rainforest was magical!

 

Due to our late arrival, we had to change up some plans and head straight to our lodging for the night, the Little Earth Lodge, in order to make the check in time. This is a wonderful little place tucked right into the landscape beside Abbey Caves. After speaking with the owner, we learned that Mermaid Pool had been closed two weeks ago due to people leaving garbage. We had planned to go up to the coast and check out the pools but learning they were closed meant we had more time for the caves. We did a short hike in the remaining day light to get a feel for the landscape of the caves. Everything is so lush and green, with cool rock formations.

We headed to town for dinner, eating at a small Turkish cafe. The lamb pitas were great and I had my first experience with turkish coffee and some small sugar jelly cube served along side. After fueling up and not looking at the clock to see how late it was, we headed back to the lodge and got ready for the reason we came to this lodge = GLOW WORMS!!

In order to not concern our host that we were caving at night (don’t worry, we are professionals!), we did a stealth hike up the drive and down the main entrance to the caves instead of just taking the lodge path over. There are 3 caves that make up Abbey Caves and we had intentions of exploring all three caves but we started and ended with Organ Cave. We spend about 3 1/2 hrs exploring and trying to take pictures of the glow worms. Glow worms hide in the cave ceiling and extrude a sticky string that captures insects. These worms glow with an intense blue, unlike the ones at home. Looking up, the ceiling looked like a beautiful night sky! The pictures just can’t due it justice. The cave itself was also amazing, the formations really cool. The river ranged from ankle deep to above our knees. We did see some of the longfinned eels and a couple of crayfish.