D48 –- Cave Tubing

We ate breakfast with the B&B owners and a young Englishman named Ryan. Like literally every other meal we’ve shared with others here, the conversation turned to, “We can’t believe Bush got re-elected. What’s up with that?” People from Australia, England, and New Zealand have all expressed confusion about his re-election, not only because they have negative opinions of Bush’s administration, but also because most of the American travelers they meet don’t approve of Bush. I guess Republicans don’t travel as much?!? Of course, as Thomas mentioned before, many people we meet have pretty hard feelings about their own country’s leadership as well. Aren't we lucky we live in contries where we can express dissent and vote! Though all three countries we’ve visited so far have had anti-Bush attitudes, we haven’t run into any anti-American sentiment. Quite the contrary, actually. The French, on the other hand . . . people really seem to dislike them. Yikes!


Our plan for the day was to go cave rafting in Charleston. On the way there, we stopped at the longest swing bridge in NZ, which spanned the Buller Gorge. Nothing too thrilling but a nice detour.

The cave rafting started with a really long walk through an extensive cave followed by tubing. It was actually great. Some of the stalactites and stalagmites were 300,000 years old. It was pretty amazing to see them. It made me feel very insignificant to see how much of a blip we are in the grand scheme of things. Near the end of the cave we got in our tubes and turned off the lights on our helmets to float through areas full of glowworms. They are long, skinny worms that hang on the ceilings of caves and give off a little point of light “out their bums.” They looked like huge bunches of stars in the sky. Very pretty and relaxing. From there we “tubed” down the Nile River, which turned out to be no more than 8 inches deep in some places! The other bummer of the trip was the wetsuits. First, putting one on is not a self-esteem builder for me – they’re really, really tight. Second, they smelled like mildew. Yuk!



We were really surprised that one of the women on the tour was six months pregnant. The walk through the cave was difficult at times because the passage was very cramped and we had to crouch to half our height to be able to squeeze through. Also, a recent flood had deposited some mud and that caused some of the walk to be very slippery. You know they’d never let a woman that pregnant do a similar trip in the US.

-Elva