After a whole night of rest following our Abel Tasman trek – we were ready for something slightly more relaxing. So we headed to Underworld Adventures to check out the infamous gloworm caves. When looking into seeing the gloworms, the top place to see them appeared to be on the north island. One the south island, the top place to view them appears to be Te Anau. But after our experience, and what we heard from others, we think this is the hidden gem of south island gloworm tours!

We joined the Underworld Rafting tour which included a small hike through the nearby caves, a relaxing float with the gloworms, and an easy river float to take us back out.

Before heading out, they dressed us up in plenty of water gear to keep us warm, including socks, booties, a wetsuit onesie, a wetsuit jacket, life vest, helmet, and paddling gloves that made me feel like:

After gearing us up – we had a short train ride before we grabbed our tubes and started exploring the caves.

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Now I don’t want to sound too snobby – but we have explored our fair share of caves. So this one was nice, but nothing to write home about. But once we got to the gloworm section – we were astounded! They popped us into our tubes and had us link up into a chain so the guide could paddle us through in the dark.

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We expected a few blue dots here and there, but what we saw looked like the starriest of skies, like a scene from Avatar. There were thousands of them! And it was relaxing, disorienting, and gorgeous! (A couple on our tour had been to the Te Anau caves, and said they did not hold a candle to what we saw here!)

We wanted to camp overnight in this part of the cave to just keep staring at them. But we floated out and did a quick river float over some “rapids” before heading back to clean up and dry off.

Once we were dry – we had a 7 hour drive to tackle. So we hit the road with a few pit stops on our itinerary. The first was at Pancake Rocks – a geological tourist attraction. An easy walking path takes you along the coastline to see these towering rocks that seem to be made of layers stacked on top of each other like pancakes!

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Our next stop was at the Franz Joseph Glacier – where it was too foggy to see anything except my friend Margaux who was also traveling in New Zealand at the time. So we grabbed dinner with her and continued on to Wanaka.

We were excited to explore Wanaka the next day – but it was grey, cold and rainy when we woke up. So we relaxed, did some laundry (which was very necessary) and made our way down to Te Anau – our base for exploring the Milford Sound!