The practice run should have been the easy part. That was our first warning that this was maybe not going to be quite the leisurely float we had been expecting. That’s right, we had just learned that as part of our trek through the caves we would have to jump off a couple of waterfalls. We were loaded into a van with our inner tubes at the ready and headed to a small river with a ladder to practice jumping off a waterfall. We are all stuffed in! Getting our splash on

The first order of serious business was stuffing ourselves into wetsuits, which is not as easy as it sounds. Our team was divided into two groups as there were too many of us to all go into the caves at one time. New Zealand scenery is breathtaking even through bus windows.Īfter stopping for breakfast and admiring the scenery from the bus windows for a couple of hours, we arrived at Waitomo. Instead, we got straight on a bus headed towards the famed Waitomo Glowworm Caves.

You’d think after 13 hours of flying and our inner clocks being thrown into a whirlwind thanks to crossing the International Date Line, we would’ve just headed to the hotel to sleep. Our New Zealand adventure began after a brief stint in Los Angeles when we finally touched down in the Land of the Long White Cloud at Auckland airport around 5 am local time. Turns out, we had no idea what we were in for and nothing could have prepared us for the astonishing caving adventure ahead… First group of Scrums ready to explore the caves! The image I – and as it turned out, several others – had in mind was of walking into a big cave with a river running through it, sitting down on my inner tube and gently floating through a magical cave full of glowworms. We knew before venturing into the Waitomo Glowworm Caves that we would be floating through the caves on inner tubes.

Survivors the quest underground wetsuit