A Cozy Apartment in Hamilton

New Zealand Travelog #35
Hamilton, NZ - Thu, 18 Apr 2024, 10pm

Tonight we're staying in Hamilton. Actually we're staying here tomorrow night, too. That's right: after several nights of hopscotching across New Zealand with one-night stands in hotels, we're back to staying multiple nights at a time in one place. "Multiple" is still only two nights, but hey, that's twice as much as one. 😂

Hamilton's a bigger city than any we've stayed in so far, and there were a lot of hotels to choose from here. ...A lot of hotels with crummy ratings! It seems like hotels on the downtown strip were largely built decades ago and haven't been kept up well. Possibly that's because there isn't resort town money coming in like with the posher hotels we drove past in Taupo and Rotorua. Anyway, given the wealth of poor choices we opted to stay away from the center of town in a small property of apartment-like rooms.



Ours is a one-bedroom apartment. The bedroom is separate from the living room/dining room combination area, which also has a single bed with a pull-out bed. Unlike the apartment-like room we had the other night in the middle of nowhere (the one with hot springs and bug swatting), this one is modern; no 1930s aesthetics or technology here. Though it doesn't have hot springs, either, or even a swimming pool.

This apartment is furnished and advertised as accommodating four people... but it doesn't really. There isn't enough space. The kitchen (photo above) is fully equipped but is tight. There's no space there to keep groceries. Like, we had just two small bags of groceries, and the only place to put them on the counter is to either side of the stove top or in the sink's drying pan. Take anything out and it risks being splashed or burned. Elsewhere in the apartment there's little storage for luggage or clothes. It looks like we'll be using the spare bed as a storage shelf.

But still, it's nice to have the room to spread out with a small dinette table in a room separate from the bedroom. This evening we bought food at a nearby Indian takeaway and ate it back in the room. We also bought some groceries for breakfasts the next two days. That'll hopefully be healthier and less expensive than buying breakfast in gas station convenience stores.

Cave Tours x2, Hiking Trails x3

New Zealand Travelog #36
Hamilton, NZ - Fri, 19 Apr 2024, 5pm

We're back to our cozy apartment in Hamilton atfer another day of adventure. Today's adventure was a stitching together of a few paid tours plus a few completely self-guided things:

• We visited the Ruakuri Cave (vendor link) with a guided tour. On the trip we heard about a few of the features in limestone caverns, the history of the Maori people, and glowworms. The cave features part was the least interesting (to me) as those features are the same around the world, this was hardly our first cave tour, and this cave/guide wasn't the best for highlighting features. I mean, anyone can tell you what stalactites and stalagmites are. I think I learned that in 4th grade science class.... But learning about Maori history was really interesting. Our guide was Maori and descended from the chief of the tribe that settled this area 750 years ago. He really personalized what it meant to him. Plus, we were among a small group that was all adults, so we asked lots of questions about Maori language, culture, and history.


• Next we visited the Waitomo Glowworm Caves (vendor link) nearby. This one focused more on the glowworms, though we'd already learned the basics at the other cave: The "worms" are the larval stage of a species of insect— so technically they're glow-maggots, not glowworms. They grow up to a 3cm long. They glow through bioluminescence, which they use to attract other insects for food. They drop sticky lines, sticky similar to how a spider web is sticky, to catch those insects. Again, this info was all a repeat from the previous tour. That's a risk with cave tours: once you've done one you've done most of all of them. The standouts on this tour, though, were that a) there were a lot more glowworms-maggots and b) we toured part of it on a boat through an underground river. I've never done an underground boat tour before!

After these tours we were on our own and visited 3 short hiking trails in the area.

• The first of these was Mangapohue Natural Bridge. A short trail led into a beautiful stream canyon to a large overhead arch. We had the area mostly to ourselves. That's always nice when outdoors, and was doubly nice after a morning spent on paid-for tours where buses pulled up to disgorge tourists by the dozens.


• Next we hiked to Piripiri Cave. A short but steep trail leads up to the entrance to a large, single-room cave. How large? I estimate it's 80' deep and 50' across. And, yes, 80' deep because you enter it near the top. Wooden stairs descend to the bottom.


• Finally we hiked to Marakopa Falls. The weather had been crummy all day but wasn't really a factor up to this point. I mean, it almost doesn't matter if it's cloudy and drizzling outside when you're in a cave. And cloudy-and-drizzling helped with the atmospherics at the natural bridge. But here at these falls it started to be a real minus. Marakopa Falls is large, which is a big plus, but the last part of the trail to it has been washed out due to floods, and with today's rains what was left of it was too slick to traverse safely... even for experienced hikers. (And by "safely" I mean "without getting covered in mud from slipping a few times".) So we viewed the falls from across the canyon.