Glow Worm Cave

We woke up on our final day in Franz Josef wondering what to do, initially we fancied walking to the lakes but decided not to after discovering how far away they were. We thought they were nearby but it turned out that the map we were given was correct in saying “not to scale” although perhaps it should have said “woefully out of scale” as the lakes were 10km away and not just down the road as they appeared on the map. As we were talking to the girl in reception she suggested going to Tatare Cave, the walk to the entrance of the walkway was a ten minute walk from the hostel, as there were glow worms in the cave. We thought why not? Nothing else to be done that day after our lake plan went up in smoke.

After packing some sandwiches we left the hostel and walked down the road passed a pub called the Alice May and turned up a lane past a few houses and onto the walking path to Tatare Caves. We had a shaded walk underneath a canopy of trees and up a reasonably steep path to the cave entrance. We had brought a torch as we were told it would be dark – the receptionist did say we could just feel our way down through the darkness with our hands on the walls but that sounded like a terrible idea. 

A small stream ranging from an inch deep to over ankle deep ran the entire way through the path of the cave, which was quite narrow; I did not need to duck but if I jumped I would have cracked my skull open (especially if I had been feeling my way through the darkness with my hands along the wall) and I could place my hands on both walls when standing in the centre of the path. We walked for around 200 metres, passing some Department of Conservation workers who had been doing something in the caves, but saw no sign of the glow worms. We stopped after a while as our feet were soaking and starting to get cold, it was only after stopping that Nicola noticed the glow worms around us. They were tiny, like little stars on a wide night sky. There were quite a few of them though, and as we walked back through the cave we stopped at regular intervals to see more of them. We had not seen glow worms before so we thought they were quite cool, but I must admit I thought they would be the size of earth worms just glowing so I was a little disappointed that they were tiny fellas. After leaving the cave we squelched our way back to the hostel to dry off and enjoy the rest of our final day in Franz Josef in the sunshine.