We are heading home today from our three day adventure. What a time it has been. We've seen so much and enjoyed one another's company to the fullest.
Before we left Paihia, we stopped very briefly at Haruru Falls. It was not far from our hotel. The boys enjoyed the wild chickens as much or more than they did the very modest falls.
As we left Paihia, and got up to speed on the highway, I think we were all sitting back, satisfied with our holiday, and ready to simply watch the kilometers click away till we returned home. But Allie had one more idea in mind. She surprised me when she turned off the main highway and drove a couple of kilometers into the bush. In doing so, she transported us into a couple of bizarre worlds that somehow co-exist within, or next to, our own.
As we drove down the hill into the parking lot of the Kawiti Glow-Worm Cave, I noticed no shimmering of light that might indicate that we had passed a dimensional barrier, nor did I feel as though I was dropping in a fast elevator, the effect which a science fiction writer I once read used to describe how it felt to travel through a worm-hole. No, the transition to the unreality we experienced in each of the world's within our world that we saw that afternoon was very localized. It took just a few steps to cross the boundary from our world into the others. I felt no physical sensations, but what amazing places we saw.
Regretably, I have no pictures of the cave experience. The guides were very strict about no photography or filming, because the intensity of the light we'd blast into the almost perfect darkness of the caves could injure the sensitive glow-worms. The lanterns provided by the guides allowed us to see but were dim enough not to affect the cave's inhabitants and their ability to feed.
Walking through that sandstone/limestone cave, I really seemed to be in a place where gravity was not in charge of things, as it is everywhere else on planet earth. Spires of rocks hung from the ceiling, glistening with wetness and other shapes; of arches, and bowls, and strange innorganic growths seemed to pulsate as the movement of the lanterns gave them a weird semblence of life. I could have spent hours in there. And I could see that the cave went farther in than we were allowed to traverse. What would it be like to explore such a place?
All too soon we were out again. I think the guides could sense the let down we all felt returning to the mundane. They pointed out that we were welcome to take the 'bushwalk' that started just across the parking lot. I perked right up.
Maybe the guides have become immune to the mind-altering effects that I felt as I started the climb into the hills over the cave, because they didn't warn me that I'd feel as though I had stepped into another world. And maybe what I felt was different than what other people feel who take the trail to the top and back down again. I think that as I slipped into that forest, I also slipped gently across some boundary into a world not quite our own.
I do have pictures from this world. I wondered if recrossing the 'boundary' when I returned to our own world might somehow affect my digital pictures, but fortunately, that didn't happen. I can show them to you.
This is an especially interesting picture. The girl in it is probably starting to pass through the bounday right about now. I think that the boundary does have a certain thckness to it. One step doesn't take you across it. I know because at one point during a very early part of my climb, I suddenly stopped and looked back. I hadn't realized as I was making the transition into the other world, but I did suddenly realize it when I was fully in. At the time, I was just a little farther in than she is now.
It was the vines that did it. That got me thinking about Dagobah. That's the planet where Yoda lived and trained Luke in Star Wars. Remember? Although this area is classed as a temperate rainforest, there are no swamps here. This is an angular forest of rocks and trees. Once you're in it, it feels as though it could just as well be a world of rocks and trees (and vines). One of the best Sci-Fi book titles of all time, in my opinion, is Ursella K. Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest. That describes this place I think. Doesn't that title switch on your imagination?
In most of my posts I try to show you the pictures in a logical sequence from the beginning to the end. In this one, I am not going to show you photos going up the trail and more coming back down. I am going to put them together in a random order, because really, there is no order in the wild assortment of shapes and sizes which you will see.
So come along. Does this forest world look to you like you imagine Mirkwood, or Fangorn to look? The Wood Between the Worlds? Some mystical forest from your own reading experiences maybe?
Looks like a plant that was left too long in it's planter and it has outgrown it.
Look at that. Trees, plants and rocks just blend together.
This is looking down into the earth at an angle of about 80 degrees. The bottom seems to be about 30 feet below me, but I'm quite sure the opening continues much deeper. I just can't see into it.
I could imagine Ents here.
I see an Easter Island-style head.
The greenery here is SO green against that rock. It didn't come out in the photo.
What a living knot of vines. I wish I could show you all around this area. Vines are everwhere.
I had the impression that each vine is actually a sort of blood vessel and does its part to tie the entire forest together, providing both nutrient channels and structural reinforcement.
The idea of this forest being a single organism reminded me of Pando, the clonal colony of quaking aspens in Utah, and closer to home, the Humongous Fungus near Crystal Falls, Michigan.
I guess it's obvious by the increased light and colors that I'm near the top of the hill. What amazing patterns in that stone.
Is it any wonder that so many writers have taken great pains to describe wonderful, mysterious, or awful forests in their works? They must have had the experience of seeing a forest that astounded them and drew inspiration from it in creating their own fictional treescapes. I hope you have enjoyed seeing this one.
It was a hard place to leave for me. That forest made me feel as though I'd like to stay in it a long time. Like I could almost set down roots myself. My thoughts drifted back to the story by Michael Coney, Whatever Became of the McGowans? This forest could make me feel that the McGowans were probably quite satisfied to change as they did.
This is what that world looks like from a distance. It's impressive but gives only a hint of what's beneath the canopy. I'd like to go back again. -djf
