Jess Wanders Off

 Lake Te Anau

 

Today I got up and did a cruise across Lake Te Anau with RealJourneys.  The trip took us to the Glowworm Caves, which were pretty incredible.  We got to go into this cave, which is a very wet one, with a river gushing through it (including a waterfall INSIDE the cave, along with a whirpool, so that was pretty cool) and then we were rowed out to this little grotto deep inside the cave that was pitch-black.  That was where we got to see all the glowworms.  They are teensy tiny little specks of blue, and there were so many of them in that grotto, it was like being in a planetarium looking at star formations or something.  Really quite cool, a very different experience.  Sorry I don’t have photos, but we weren’t allowed to take pictures inside the cave.

Glowworms are strange little guys.  They basically drop down a thread like a fishing line, light up their rear ends so that the glow will attract moths and insects, catch them on their thread, then reel them in and eat them.  They also eat each other, though, so go figure.

Anyway that was fun.  After I saw the glowworms and arrived back on solid land in Te Anau, I did some walking around town, and went to see their wilderness reserve, where they have a bunch of interesting native birds.  The best was the takahe, which is a very rare bird — there are only like 300 of them in existence, and they only live in this part of New Zealand, nowhere else in the world.  So that was pretty cool to see.  The takahe is a large (knee-high maybe) bright blue bird with a funny orange beak and orange chicken-legs.  Cool little guy.

 

 Takahe

 

We also got to see keas (those cheeky parrots), and a lot of other native parakeet-type things.

 

Native Parakeet

 

We also got to see the fat New Zealand field pigeons.  Not very sociable.

 

 

I bade farewell to Te Anau at 4:30pm, getting on a bus back to Queenstown.  After the 2 hour bus ride was over, I walked to my hotel and realized what a very long walk it was out to Frankton (where my hotel is).  It’s sooooo cold here, but at least it’s dry.  My hotel room is nice and luxurious.

More tomorrow!

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 30th, 2006 at 4:38 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.