Waitomo for Kim's b.day - a little while ago

We had a beautiful weekend in Waitomo for Kim's b.day.
We rented a little cabin on a farm just outside of the village of Waitomo. The owners were so cool - they said they weren't doing this hospitality thing for money, but for the opportunity to meet people. Strangely, however, when I asked them if we still had to pay they said, 'yes'. Here you see Kim and I enjoying a beautiful sunrise from our cabin's porch. Was it really beautiful? Take a look...

it was indeed beautiful.







The cabin was quite nice. Chloe approved.






Waitomo is famous for it's glow worms. These glow worms are a larvae of some kind of fly-ish thing that spin a little web then spark up a light to attract their prey. Their prey of choice is...bad little boys and girls that talk back to their parents! and it gobbles them up, because they didn't listen to their parents. Most suckers who visit Waitomo have to pay $$$ to tour glow worms caves crowded with lots of stinky European tourists. However, we had our own glow worm grotto located five minutes from our cabin front door!



And, as everyone knows, glow worms attract other night creatures...such as...





Possums! These kiwi possums aren't like American opossums. They aren't as big and they don't have the big gnarly tail 'merican opossums have, thankfully.




They sound like little kids crying, which really creeped Kim out. I confess I found it a bit creepy too.






There's lots of cool stuff around Waitomo. We drove ~20min from our cabin then hiked about 15min to this natural bridge. This was a beautiful Saturday in the middle of one of NZ's banner summers and we were the only dudes there! We later found out from our hosts that some scenes from Hercules were filmed there.






We drove another 15min and had another 15min hike to this beautiful waterfall. Again, it was our own private waterfall. Sweet.







We drove to the village for lunch and stopped at the Shearing Shed, where, of course, they shear rabbits.






This is a furry rabbit. It's an angora rabbit that the Germans bred.







Well, you just stretch that rabbit out and go to town with your clippers. The pics might not convey it, but, these rabbits were pretty chilled out about getting sheared, they get sheared 3x/year. And these guys clearly loved their precious rabbits, so no need to notify PETA.




This is the rabbit relieved of its fur.






At night we sat outside and counted the stars. I got up to 200.