Back by popular demand, a Lukey post

Over the last few days, we’ve seen a lot of beautiful things. We walked through a forest and Mom really liked these fern trees. We came to a 120 foot waterfall. Pretty awesome!

This is another fall we saw the next day. It was smaller, but still very cool. We also saw an amazing rock bridge formation made from a collapsed cave.

Here, we saw stalactites and stalagmites in the caves of Waitomo. We were on a tour that took us in a dry cave to walk through, and then one that had a river down the middle and we rode in a boat.

Here we are preparing to go into the wet cave. We are wearing helmets and headlamps because it’s very dark in order to see the glowworms. The glowworms are tiny worms that have a cocoon and hang on the cave ceilings. They have strings that catch their food like a spider and tails that glow in the dark. Their lights look like thousands of stars in the sky. It was amazing!

The next day we went to see geysers and mud pools in a geothermal area of the country. This is one of the geysers erupting, although we thought it would go higher. We may have missed the high part…

We got to stick our feet in a geothermal pool that was cooler than the others. Most are bubbling and boiling hot, 150-250 degrees!

Here is the largest bubbling mud pool we saw. The gurgling sounds were funny.  

And last but not least, this is Archie! He is a golden retriever who lived at the home in Cambridge where we stayed in the Airbnb apartment out back. He loved to snuggle.