Waitomo Caves...

These are the coolest things in the world. We got to go black water rafting in a cave. So we got down to the caves in the morning and had to put on these awesome wetsuits. You had to put on booties, and a full wetsuit, jacket, and these hard waterproof boots. We also had hard helmets and head lamps. We were all decked out. Then we got our tubes and had to go practice jumping off a 5 ft high platform into the river because we were going to be jumping of a waterfall in the cave. Then after we had been deemed decent enough jumpers to hop of a waterfall in the caves we headed in. The water was so cold but you couldn't really feel it through your wetsuit and we started to walk through the caves. The water wasn't super high in parts so we had to walk a lot on the rocks and the guides liked to have us turn off our head lamps so a lot of the time I was stumbling over rocks in the dark. I think I fell like 5 times. So we finally got to the waterfall and hopped in and it was so neat to just float down these caves. But that's not even the best part. The reason that these caves are so cool is because the have glow worms. They are these small worms that live on the ceiling of the caves and the glow phosphorescent blue. They also are silk worms and have little threads of silk that they produce. You look up at the ceiling of the caves and it looked like you were out in the night sky looking at up the stars because there were just so many of them. It was beautiful. If any of you have seen Planet Earth they actually do a little segment on the glow worms. Check it out and I saw those in person.

This isn't a great picture but this is what the ceiling of the cave looks like. Stars in a night sky, but on the ceiling of a cave. And their worms.

The silk threads from the worms