We left Taranaki once we could see that the clouds underneath us were breaking up (the views of the cloud inversion from our campsite were awesome!), After a brief and fruitless search for an accessible river with a swimming hole in the national park headed to the lowlands to get clean. We stopped at meeting of the waters reserve which ticked all our boxes of nice big swimming hole with a grassy picnic spot for Eddie wiggles, with the added bonus of a rope swing too!
For the evening we headed to Tongaporutu free campsite to have a wander to the three sisters, a group of sea stacks on a black sand beach. We had a very pleasant wander along the beach where we explored some little sea caves inside the stacks, before returning to the van to watch sunset over a cheesy pasta dinner.
We rose mega early the next day to shoot off to Waitomo, one of the most famous caving regions in NZ! Seeing as we were going one by one due to being responsible parents and we hadn’t found any other cavers in the area to go play with, we decided to go mega touristy instead of hardcore and used the rest of my vouchers (thanks again Marple girls!) To take turns to go floating down an underground river on an inner tube. It was awesome! The glowworms were so bright you could pretty much navigate by them, and floating on your back gave you an excellent vantage point! While one of us was underground, the other toured some of the other attractions of the area- a nice rock arch, a massive waterfall and a brief more baby-friendly cave.
Parenting Responsibly 