Waitomo

The caves were formed in limestone laid down under the sea and then lifted and tilted, with streams cutting passages through it over hundreds of thousands of years. Ngāti Maniapoto knew the system long before Europeans did, using some caves for burials and others as shelters, and the name Waitomo joins wai, water, with tomo, a hole or shaft.

After the Waikato War of the 1860s this was the heart of the King Country, closed to Europeans by Māori authority for around two decades. In December 1887 Tane Tinorau, who lived nearby, and the surveyor Fred Mace built a raft and entered the main cave by candlelight where the Waitomo Stream goes underground. By 1889 Tinorau and his wife Huti had opened it to visitors and were leading groups for a fee. The Crown nationalised the cave in 1904 and managed it as a tourist attraction from 1905, running it for most of the 20th century; in 1989 the land was returned to the descendants of the original owners, who share in the revenue and in the running of the business.

Ruakuri and Aranui were developed as show caves in turn, and local operators developed black-water rafting, floating visitors through the streamway in wetsuits on inner tubes. The village that grew up around the ticket office now receives hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, most of them for a few hours, which is why so much of it consists of car parks, a visitor centre and a scatter of accommodation.

Waitomo's culture is a mixture of Māori guardianship, farming and adventure tourism. Ngāti Maniapoto's connection to the caves is explained on every tour, and guides often open underground with a karakia, a form of prayer or incantation, before leading groups into the dark. Burial caves in the district remain tapu and are not shown to visitors, and the modern spiral entrance at Ruakuri exists precisely so that the sacred natural entrance is not used.

Above ground the identity is King Country pastoral: sheep and beef farms, shearing sheds, dogs on the back of utes, and a strong provincial rugby following. Te Kūiti, the nearest town, calls itself the shearing capital of the world and has a seven-metre statue of a shearer, and the national shearing championships are held there.

The third strand is the caving and guiding community, which is small, professional and international in outlook. Many guides are cavers first, and the techniques used on commercial abseiling and tubing trips came out of exploration in the surrounding hills. Visitors are expected to listen carefully to briefings, keep to the boardwalks, and stay quiet on the boat ride, where noise and light affect the glowworms — a rule enforced with more firmness than most things in rural New Zealand.

Only a few hundred people live in and immediately around the village, in a district of roughly ten thousand spread over a very large rural area. The resident community is small enough that the school, shops and services people use are in Te Kūiti or Ōtorohanga, and many of those who work at the caves commute from those towns.

The economy has two legs. Tourism provides most of the jobs — guiding, driving, hospitality, maintenance — and is markedly seasonal, busy through the southern summer and much quieter in winter, with the mid-week lull filled by school and coach groups. Farming provides the rest: sheep and beef on steep limestone country, some dairying in the valleys, and forestry on harder land.

Life follows the tour timetable during the day and goes very quiet at night, when the village has a tavern and little else. Local concerns are practical: water and wastewater for a settlement that hosts far more people than it houses, housing for seasonal staff, and the condition of the caves themselves. Carbon dioxide from visitors' breath, along with humidity and temperature, is monitored inside the glowworm cave, and tour numbers can be limited to protect the formations and the glowworm colony.

There is no distinct Waitomo cuisine, and the choice in the village is small: café food during the day, pub meals in the evening, and the King Country's farming produce as the basis of most menus. Lamb and beef raised on the surrounding hills, Waikato dairy products and cheese, and the New Zealand standards of meat pies, fish and chips and a cooked brunch are what most visitors eat here.

The regional traditions are worth knowing. Māori cooking in the district includes hāngī, meat and vegetables steamed in an earth oven, and kai gathered from stream and bush: tuna, the freshwater eel, taken from the Waitomo and Mangapu streams, and watercress and pūhā, a sow thistle, cooked with pork. The huhu grub, the larva of a native beetle that lives in rotting wood, is a traditional bush food, eaten raw or cooked in a hāngī and often likened to peanut butter. Whitebait, the tiny translucent juvenile fish scooped from the lower reaches of the west coast rivers beyond Te Anga, is a seasonal delicacy, usually bound into fritters.

For anything more elaborate, or for supplies, people drive to Te Kūiti or Ōtorohanga, where the supermarkets, bakeries and takeaways are, or further to Hamilton. Farm gates and honesty boxes in the valleys sell eggs, honey and seasonal fruit.