All I knew what was happening today was that we were going “canyoning”…whatever that meant. We drive about two to three hours inland to the Blue Mountains and stop at a hostel. We are greeted by a man named Aidan. He gets us to sign some forms and goes through the day with our guide. I can’t remember his name, but his nickname was the “Cat”. Apparently, the day included needing wetsuits and climbing gear. At this point, this still makes very little sense to me. They have us try on wet suits and put on shoes that can get wet, gives us each a yellow back pack, and wet packs inside. Usually this “tour” is done with up to ten people, but we were the only ones booked in for this day. So it became a private tour. Also, it was freezing, and I was wearing running shorts and a work-out, breathable shirt.
After getting all our gear together, we hop onto a van and “The Cat” drives us to the mountains. He stops, gets out, and leads us to a path. He teaches us how to put on the harnesses, and while we put our harnesses on, he climbs up a 5 meter cliff and attaches some ropes to the top of it, and throws the loose ends down. He proceeds to give us some instructions as to how to go down the side of the cliff. Antoine goes first and jumps down with a breeze. I, however, have a slight fear of heights. I go up, try it, and I very slowly, make it down to the bottom. “The Cat” offers for me to try again, before we go to the cliff that’s twice the size. Great.
The cliff that’s 15 meters, falls into a valley. Apparently, what looks like a 50-story-drop was only twice the size. There’s a ledge. Once again, Antoine goes first, rather quickly. Then I try. I go down, slowly, so slow, if I fall, I could die. The last 3 meters has no rock, so you are literally just hanging from a rope, lowering yourself to the ground. Once I got to the bottom, I unhooked myself and walked all the way around, following a trail back up to the top. That hike was surprisingly more tiring than the alpining. We did this cliff twice each.
The next cliff was twice the size of the last one, 30 meters. Apparently it is mostly just hanging. And again, Antoine goes first, and does it unnecessarily quick. I go, and let myself down so slow, I spin once I run out of rock to kick off of, the wind pushing me in whichever direction it wants to. I do this one once, Antoine does it twice. The walk back up the cliff, is more of rock climb than anything else. But the taller cliffs next to it have so many gaps in it, that when you scream, the echo is amazing.
We decide that it is lunch time. They had packed us some sandwiches and we ate at the head of some hiking trails. We listened and watched the birds. A magpie got pretty close to us, he was threatening, his beak was sharp.
After lunch, we grabbed our wetsuits and harnesses and head down to the canyon. On the way down, we learned that snakes don’t tend to bite, and when they do bite, most of the time there won’t be any venom since they are trying to conserve their venom for bigger and badder things. Whereas baby snakes can not control their venom glands so you should avoid baby snakes.
Once we made it down to the bottom of the canyon, we put on our wetsuits, wet socks, and put our clothes in the wet-bags and started heading down into the water. It was so cold. But the wet suit did help if you stayed in the water, past the initial shock of the cold. However, not all parts of the water was deep enough for your whole body, but just up to your knees, or ankles.
Certain parts of this canyon walk was to jump into the freezing cold water from heights that I did not want to jump from. Antoine had no problem, I, on the other hand, could not force my body to jump into freezing cold water from that height, and if you didn’t jump far enough, you would hit a large rock. So after a few minutes of not jumping and just screaming, I asked the guide if I could just slide down. The poor guy has been avoiding the water as his wetsuit was significantly thinner and shorter than ours. He jumped in the water and let me slide in and he caught my feet and lowered me slowly.
There was some more swimming, avoiding rocks, and just walking. Finally, we reached the end. The 30 meter waterfall. It’s slippery, cold water is pouring down on your face, some of it is just a drop, and its cold. I go first this time, I can’t remember why, but I did. On the way down, I noticed that some bystanders were gathering, watching me go down the waterfall. I have an audience, I can not mess up now. Every time I feel a slip, I just slow down, catch my footing, and keep going. I didn’t slip on the water until the last 3 meters. I just lowered myself in the water.
Antoine went started going down after me, he slipped 5 meters in. He just kept slipping after gathering his footing, it was great.
Our guide leaped down like a glorious antelope, like it was nothing.
Once we changed out of our wetsuits, we hiked back up to the top of the canyon, which honestly, was the hardest part of the whole thing.
We got back to the car at around 3pm and had 6 hour drive ahead of us. The mistake we made, was stopping to take a nap and stopping to eat. The nap made us both more tired, and stopping to eat just added time to our drive. Antoine was so desperate to stay awake, he took a shot of espresso from a passing McDonalds. He hated it. We did not make it to our AirBnb until around 11pm, exhausted. Luckily, the AirBnb was nice, the bathroom was huge.