After spending a few days in Auckland, we continued our New Zealand trip by driving south to Waitomo to explore their cave system. We booked two tours—one of the Waitomo Glowworm Cave and one of the Ruakuri Cave.

Photographs were not permitted inside the Waitomo Glowworm Cave, but I was able to snap this shot from outside after the boat tour was over.

In between the tours, we took a quick break and I had some lunch at their café.

The Ruakuri Cave was in a different area from the Waitomo Glowworm Cave, so we took our rental car over and met up with the tour guide at the Ruakuri entrance.

We descended into the cave through a long, winding ramp.

Our tour guide took us through the cave, explaining the history of the rock formations and teaching us about the biology of glowworms.

You may be wondering where the glowworms were. If you’re not familiar, glowworms are bioluminescent insect larvae. The marketing materials for the Wiatomo Glowworm Caves made them seem extremely bright and vibrant… but this is basically the best that we saw:

Keep in mind that this photo is from my camera’s raw sensor data with everything enhanced right up to the point where leveling it any higher would cause static to appear in the image. They were barely visible, and to make things worse, I have astigmatism so I could hardly see the lights and couldn’t really get my eyes to focus in on them.

In case it wasn’t obvious from the photograph, no, those are not real climbers—they set up those mannequins to demonstrate what people had to do a long time ago to enter and map out the cave.

The glowworms were disappointingly underwhelming. To give them the benefit of the doubt, there are certain seasons during which the glowworms are brighter and more visible, but based on what I saw, the photos that they show on their website seem outright deceptive.

With that being said, the cave system was interesting and I enjoyed seeing all the rock formations. I have been to Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota in the United States of America before, and it was nice seeing the difference in rock structures between the two.