Today I am black water rafting the Black Labyrinth with The Legendary Black Water Rafting Co.

Underneath Waitomo stretches 50kms of cave passage. The rocks reminds me of Punakaiki and its famous Pancake Rocks. The difference is that here you have much more pancake rocks and the caves are made of pancake rocks!

After getting into a wetsuit, we head for the exercise area with our tires: we have to learn how to jump correctly backward from a waterfall.

As soon as we enter the cave, we light up our head lights and make our way through the stalagtites. Our guides make some deep sound echo with a 50cm hole in the rock: huuuuuuummmmmmm. I try but unfortunatly my voice is a bit too high... I can't be a black water rafting guide then ;-)

As we are only two this afternoon, we have a 10 minute bonus in the form of a serie of 2-3 metre waterfall to climb underground! That's so exhilarating and easy thanks to the guides! Usually to get to this part, you have to do the 'Black Abyss' which is two hours longer.

We then continue walking in the cave and shortly after we jump in the tyre and get to an area with many glowworms: they are so beautiful and thanks to the guide making a big 'Bang' noise with his tire, they reacted by glowing even more!

It's then time to jump from the underground waterfall as practised before. It's a bit scary from the top but everything goes ok and that was a lot of fun!

We then arrive in a giant cave and take a look up through a 60m high chimney: at the end I can see the light from outside.

We then marvel at more glowworms: thanks to a new bang, it's now possible to see each other just thanks to the thousands of glowworms!

Our enthusiastic guides happily share their knowledge of cave formation and cave life with us.

I would recommend this Black Water Rafting as a must do in New Zealand.