Ngarua Caves

Our flight from Nelson didn’t leave until the afternoon, so we stopped on our drive back to tour the Ngarua Caves. We arrived a little after 10 and discovered that there would be a tour at 10:30, so we joined that, along with around 12 other people.

We donned hard hats and met our guide, Rachel, at the mouth of the cave. I enquired about cave wētā   but it appears they don’t have any. We were enjoined not to touch any of the stalactites or stalagmites as contamination from oils on your fingers will slow down growth…which is a leisurely 25mm every 80 years. Strange units, you might think? Well, it probably started out as one inch every 80 years.

We walked through with Rachel taking up the rear to ensure no-one got left behind, and stopped at the Stop signs where she gave us a bit of information about each place, including how they were discovered in the first place: apparently an apprentice surveyor dropped a tool whilst out doing some surveying, and it fell down a hole. “Well, go and get it” said his supervisor….and presto! Caves discovered! The caves are in a rock formation caused by the collision of two plates, and are about 450 million years old. These days, electricity, boardwalks and handrails have been installed to ease our passage and we are able to explore more. Some of them had columns where stalactites and stalagmites had fused. There was also a complete skeleton of a moa that had fallen through a pothole and died down there - several such skeletons have been discovered. We ended up in a large cave unsurprisingly called The Cathedral, which was the end of the system as far as we were concerned. We then ascended a set of Death Stairs to reach the outside and emerge, blinking, into the sunlight.

We drove on from there and stopped at McCashin’s Brewery for some lunch. Last time we were there I acquired some feijoa liqueur from the bottle shop and intended to do the same this time, only to find that Nelson Council had rescinded their licence and they were unable to sell me any. Poo.

That was about the end of our travels. We dropped the somewhat muddy car off at the rental place and waited for our flight to Wellington.

Pembroke Castle

Tenby is in the county of Pembrokeshire, which has a town called Pembroke. Nicola went to Pembroke College at Oxford, so you’d think there’d have been more of a connection between the college and the place, but sadly not. It took its name by being founded by the second Earl of Pembroke, but that’s it.

Pembroke Castle was an important fortification on the South Wales coast, and played a major part in the area’s history. We were dropped off by Kathryn and Alison, who were heading further afield to Carew Castle, and arranged to be picked up shortly after 12:00pm. We arrived around 10:15, just in time, once ticketing etc. had been sorted out, to join the first tour of the day at 10:30. Wendy, our guide, took us through the history of the castle in roughly chronological order, concentrating on the major personalities who had been at the castle, its battles and besiegements, and the history of the area. She majored on the women of Pembroke, many of whom were very wealthy, and how ownership of the castle was passed down through marriage and inheritance to different families, influential in the court of medieval England. She brought us up to date by describing the castle's decline and abandonment before being bought by the Philipps family in the early 20^th century, and whose family are still involved in the care of the castle through a charitable trust. 

Kathryn had told us that they were running late at Carew, so we did a quick walk of the walls and battlements (going the wrong way, it increasingly became clear!), before grabbing a cup of tea from the café. As we sat drinking tea we got a text from Kathryn saying they were in the car park, so we packed up and walked out, stopping only to take a picture of William Marshal’s statue, which is intended to show him with the Magna Carta, but actually looks like he’s checking his cell phone. 

In the afternoon we went out onto the beach at low tide, and had a look at some of the caves that are uncovered when the tide falls. We failed to find any smugglers’ caches, so spent the rest of the afternoon idling about.

Going Underground

We departed Perth on Monday morning and drove down to Margaret River. It’s a fair hop – around 250 km – but the roads were fairly clear and we made good time to Bunbury, where I’d originally planned to stop off, so we pushed through and made it to Margaret River in time for a spot of lunch at the Settlers pub, before checking into our accommodation and doing a bit of shopping for essentials. We then walked up the road in the evening to Katch Up, a local seafood restaurant, where I had marron and Nicola had a snapper.

Our first full day in Margaret River, and we’re off on a tour of indoor activities as the weather forecast is for dry, yet still quite cool temperatures. Unlike the heat of Perth, where we spent the weekend, it’s several degrees cooler down here – to the extent that I was back into long trousers. we headed out immediately after breakfast to get down to the most south-westerly tip of Australia, Cape Leeuwin, home to Australia’s tallest mainland lighthouse. We climbed the 276 stairs to the top as our guide explained about the construction, manning, and operation of the lighthouse, before it was automated in the 1980s. We looked out for whales but didn’t see any, but did see a hawk out looking for its lunch.

After a quick beverage we drove up to Jewel Cave, one of the four main tourist caves in the region. Jewel cave is known for having the longest straw, a type of stalactite, in Australia, and the second-longest in the world. There’s also all kinds of other stalactite and stalagmite formations, naturally enough. We walked down some stairs to get through the cave complex, some parts of which we had to duck under or around but no particularly tight bits, so we were OK just in street clothes and didn’t need to get hard-hatted and boilersuited, or anything like that. Our guide explained all about the various types of formation and the conditions which led to their particular shapes.

We took in a quick lunch at Café Boranup before checking into the second excursion, Lake Cave. This is entered through a doline, which is a collapsed cave, so we had to descend several hundred stairs just to get to the beginning of the cave system. Lake Cave, as its name suggests, is a wet cave system (Jewel Cave is dry), and once you get down to the water all the walkways are on the same level, natch. It’s not as big a cave system as the Jewel, but there are some spectacular formations there. They also change the lighting effects and switch off the lights completely at one point so you can see what real darkness is – you literally cannot see your hand in front of your face.

This formation is the star of the show - it's two columns (stalactites and stalagmites that have joined together) formed on a base of sandstone, which has since been eroded away by the water. The former floor of the cave now sits above the water level - that's its reflection you can see immediately below it.

We’d caught the last tour of the day there at 3:30pm so decided to call it a day there, and drove back to Margaret River. We parked up and explored the town centre a bit more so that we could decide on dinner locations for the rest of our week here.