On the road... New Plymouth

Ooooooh. 

We’ve spent a couple of days on the road now and have made it as far as New Plymouth, home of the Wind Wand. It’s a ball. On a stick. A long, red stick. And it blows in the wind. Woo hoo. 

I don’t get most modern art. I guess that explains why I majored in accounting. 

On a brighter(?) note, yesterday we went blackwater rafting. It was amazing! The Legendary Blackwater Rafting Co. put us in tight rubber suits (it was NOT pretty), gave us a tube, and threw us into ice-cold water that ran into underground caves. On the roof of the caves, there were thousands of glow worms. As we floated through the caverns, it was like floating through space as the galaxies fly by.

Glow worms

Really, the glow worms are not worms at all. That's a marketing trick. In fact, they are fly larvae, a.k.a. maggots. They stick to the ceiling and drop 20-30 sticky web-like strands that are used to trap flying insects as they fly through the caves. To help attract their lunch, they mix an enzyme with their crap that causes it to glow green. Once they've had a few months to grow as larvae, they wrap up in a cocoon where they become adult flies. In the process, they gain reproductive organs that are about 10% of their body mass, and they lose their mouth and digestive tract (a good trade, eh?). They then locate a mate and reproduce for 24-36 hours, which is coincidently the amount of time it takes until the male dies of exhaustion. The female then lays 100+ eggs and dies herself. So, long-story short, we paid to float through freezing cold waters to look at maggots with shiny shit that are going to eat and then screw themselves to death. Pleasant, no? 

We are now in New Plymouth where we plan to do a little hiking and city exploration. Oh, and note the pics above are not mine. I have a cd of pics from blackwater rafting, but no way to get them off the cd for now. I'll update this later with better pics later. Until then...