Christmas in the cave

Day 83

When you stand in front of a huge waterfall in the middle of the jungle on Christmas with a t-shirt and then march through the pouring rain after crawling through a cave, you know you're in New Zealand.

Today is the second day of Christmas and the last Christmas hours are slowly coming to an end. During the Christmas days we were in Whangarei, a slightly larger city in the Northland. On Christmas Eve we had a fancy dinner, more expensive than our wallet actually allows, but while we ordered and enjoyed our decadent food, we didn't look at the prices, as we had to do in the past few months. When the bill came, our jaws dropped, but we don't regret anything. After all, it's Christmas. I must mention that drinking red wine certainly awakens an elitist awareness, but nobody can tell me that someone really enjoys that stuff. But it doesn't matter, at least the white wine was good, and it actually came from Malborough, the region of New Zealand where we worked on a vineyard a few weeks ago.

All in all, Christmas Eve was really successful (is that what you say?), even though it was pouring rain outside, which only distracted us a little from our Crème Brûlée.

Just as we were getting our dessert, Linus' brother Moritz joined us. His bus from Auckland was unfortunately two hours late and he is visiting us in New Zealand for the next and last few days.

Christmas Day, December 25th yesterday, was less contemplative compared to the cozy dinner the day before, but not less exciting. The plan was to walk from the hotel without a plan, towards a waterfall near Whangarei. We reached it one hour later. The weather was excellent, the waterfall was gigantic, and the Christmas day could begin. "This damn app is showing 80% rain again", said Linus and we looked at the blue sky and laughed. Ten minutes later, we marched on with our jackets in the pouring rain. That's New Zealand.

The goal was the Abbey Caves, the underground caves nearby. And on the map, they looked "easily accessible on foot". A little later, we found ourselves on a busy highway, walking in a row, one after the other, constantly crossing the road, going where the walking strip was wider. After about an hour of walking in the Christmas drizzle, we reached the cave and we were rewarded. We stood in front of a dark cave entrance, with only about three meters of visibility in its stony depth. Luckily, Linus and I happened to have our headlamps with us, and Moritz simply used his mobile phone flashlight at the beginning. We didn't have much other equipment with us, and we felt ridiculously naive in our sneakers and beach-like outfits. But we were still too curious about what awaited us in the depths, so we descended into the rocky darkness one by one. First, we were greeted by a shallow river, so we had to take off our shoes after a while to get further inside. Later, we saw hundreds of small glowing dots on the cave ceiling. Glowworms. On the left and right were about five-meter-high rock walls, in front of us was the damp, two-meter-wide path that reached into the darkness. It was incredible. The cave was like something out of a movie, extremely fascinating with all the glowworms and the perfectly formed gorge, but also creepy. And when Moritz mentioned a movie in which a cyclist had to cut off his own arm because he had fallen into a crevice, and I mentioned the Thai football team that was surprised by the water in a similar cave at the beginning of this year, we actually just wanted to get out again. Nevertheless, we were inside and so we didn't spend Christmas under the Christmas tree, but in an ancient cave reminiscent of the Stone Age.

Today we drove to the Coromandel Peninsula with the car we rented for the last few days, where the three of us have a small apartment directly on the beach for a few days. It really feels like a summer vacation, completely different from the past. We are now in one place, have a real bed and the beach and the sun right outside the door.

Christmas is already over and we are now enjoying our last days and are curious about New Year's Eve. At the other end of the world.