NEW ZEALAND
AUGUST 2017 596:1
22:1
27kg
The campervan rolls south out of Piha in the haze
of early morning. Grey banks of cloud shift across the
glossy hills and fields where gangly sheep farmers round
up super-sized flocks numbering more than a thousand.
Neither the livestock nor the terrain at the western edge
of the North Island would look out of place in the Welsh
valleys. Evergreen vales and dimpled pastures surround
the one-street town of Waitomo, while, beyond the
roadside, rumpled farmlands and wool sheds are a
picture of serenity. Flocks doze on mossy crags as local
farmers watch a rugby game in town. Calm, peaceful and
seemingly unremarkable, this place gives nothing away
of the preternatural treasures hidden below the topsoil.
Even in a country as geographically blessed as New
Zealand, the Waitomo Caves command a special status.
A network of fathomless, pitch-black passages, they are
places long sacred to the Ma ̄ori, but also to speleologists
like Angus Stubbs, a third-generation farmer-turned-
caver. For the past 20 years, this modern-day caveman
has found sanctuary in their honeycombed caverns and
sunken potholes. They are the North Island’s cathedrals,
he says, created by millennia of water erosion and now
home to a subterranean river and labyrinthine tunnels.
The local Kawhia tribe used the area’s limestone
catacombs as burial sites to access the afterlife, but the
Victorians were more interested in what they could take
away. They plundered the caves one by one, digging up
museum-piece curiosities and the skeletons of giant
moa birds. A flightless creature hunted to extinction by
the Ma ̄ori, its bones fetched a fine price at auction back
in London.
Angus leads the way down into the Ruakuri Cave, the
midday sun vanishing behind the snap of a trapdoor.
Squeezing through narrow gaps into a cavernous
obsidian-black hangar, our eyes adjust to the darkness.
And then they appear: thousands of underground stars
lighting up the vaulted gallery like a lattice of
subterranean sky.
‘These little fellas are just like me,’ says Angus, shining
a torch on the glowworms, known first to the Ma ̄ori as
‘titiwai’ – water stars. ‘Not pretty when the lights are on,
but beautiful when it’s dark.’
SHEEPONOMICSThe current number of
sheep to humans in New
Zealand, the country with
the world’s highest ratio.The proportion of sheep to
people in New Zealand at its
peak, back in 1982.The weight of New
Zealand’s heftiest ever
fleece, belonging to a ram
named Shrek, who became
a national icon when, after
years of avoiding capture,
he was shorn in 2004.The weight of the fleece
belonging to an Australian
sheep named Chris, who
overtook Shrek in 2015 to
claim the title of world’s
heaviest-ever fleece – the
average typically weighs
just 4.5kg.41k g
AUGUST 2017 59