Glow worms

On the road to Te Anau from Milford Sound we again stopped off at a couple of little tidbits. One was a stroll along a boardwalk to the Mirror Lakes, so named for their stillness and position that reflects the distant mountains. The second stop was a pretty cool chasm with a raging stream blasting through it. Naturally I had to take a detour down the steep sides of the chasm to check out the restful pools at the bottom - a tour bus had arrived at the chasm just before us, so I took the detour to try and avoid them. Strangely none of the tour group decided to take the same detour!

On arriving at Te Anau we sorted out accommodation at the local Top 10 campsite, and I went for a stroll about the small town as Sarah cooked dinner. Then it was back to the lake side for our 9pm ferry trip to the glow worm caves. Our ferry boat was super modern and so flew across the lake in about an hour. It was a wonderfully clear night, and the isolation of being out on the lake made for a great star gazing opportunity.

The tour of the caves was very good, although the cave system is quite young, and so not very extensive, although it does have an impressively powerful stream running through it (which carries the hatching larvae and stuff that the glow worms feed on). The highlight, of course, is the actual little boat ride deep inside the cave to see the glow worms themselves. They are a beautiful sight, just all these tiny pinpricks of dull green light. You have to be very quite and not move about so as not to disturb them (the boat is pulled along by the guide, no motor or anything), so it was very peaceful.

One aspect of the glow worms that struck me on this trip was how difficult it was to actually focus on an individual worm's glow. Unless I really concentrated, the pinprick was actually more of a small blur. What struck me was the similarity to the explaination given to me by an astronomer at the observatory back in Tekapo of why the milky way looks so blurry. He explained that the milky way is actually made up of billions of tiny pinpricks of star light, but that our eyes are not good enough to focus on them individually, and so the whole affair appears as a blurry cloud (god might have been good at building human eyes, but he wasn't that good). It seemed to me that the glow worms' tiny, faint glow appeared as something similar, although I could be talking complete rubbish!

Anyway, after the cave trip they show you a video about the lives of the glow worms, which I thought was really impressive, although they are pretty disgusting critters in a way. Then it was a quick trip back across the lake and home to bed.

Next day, Queenstown.