Tourism to Waitomo caves picking up but hampered by damaged roading network

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A Waitomo Glowworm Caves tour.
Photo: Waitomo Caves

Tourism to Waitomo’s glow-worm caves is quietly picking up after Covid hit, but the area is struggling with the impact extreme weather has had on the roads.

Before the global pandemic, Waitomo hosted around half a million visitors a year – more tourists than any other attraction in the country.

The damaged road network is slowing the tourism recovery and affecting the district as a whole.

Waitomo mayor John Robertson said the district’s roading problems go back to Cyclone Dovi in February 2022.

It left a trail of destruction, and as roads were fixed more bad weather kept coming… and coming, doing more and more damage.

Robertson said more needed to be done if the district was to reach its full potential.

“If this is the pattern of climate events, looking into the future, we need more resilient roads,” he said.

Robertson said both local roads and state highways needed more investment.

“While we’ve got local roads with slip-outs and things, we have state highways through our area that don’t feel to me like they’re being maintained like they used to. Or, the flipside of that, the weather is changing and they need to be invested in far more then they are.”

In the January floods this year State Highway 37, the main road into Waitomo village, was closed for four days.

Daniel Thorne of Discover Waitomo said roading issues were not new.

“It has been an ongoing discussion that [SH37] and the backroads have always been problematic as access to the region.”

Waka Kotahi manages the state highways. Waikato system manager Cara Lauder said compared to other state highways, the ones around Waitomo were not too bad.

Careful thought was needed when trying to fix roads that flooded, and it was not as easy as just raising the road, she said.

“A road can become a dam to surrounding land and then you can just be pushing the problem off the roads and into other people’s property,” Lauder said.

Matt Harvey from Tourism Holdings said the Covid-19 pandemic raised a unique set of risks, and climate change related weather was adding new ones. But he said seeing the buzz returning to Waitomo was fantastic.

While in Waitomo, RNZ spoke to tourists leaving the glow-worm caves. They came from around the world, including India, Spain, and South Korea.

Responses to what they had seen included ‘amazing’; ‘haven’t seen this anywhere else in the world’; ‘very beautiful’; ‘impressive’; and ‘wonderful.’

Traversing potholes and slips seemed to be still worth it.

Waitomo covers a large area, with a small rating population, and it has around $12 million of road repairs to do.

Building resilience is a key focus of council’s current annual planning.