Canyoning, Swinging, Jetboating, oh my!

Pictures

EARLY RISER: My morning began early, against my will, when the fire alarm convienently went off around 4AM. I was dead asleep, but it’s hard to sleep through an alarm when the siren is just feet from your head on the top bunk. It’s rather surreal being woken up in this matter, as it took me quite a few minutes to figure out exactly what was going on and if I was actually awake or not.

Of course, it turned out to be a false alarm, and the entire hostel grumbled back inside, cursing the unknown forces that set off the alarm, and we got a few more hours of treasured sleep. 7AM arrived much too quickly, and we were up and getting ready for extreme canyoning.

CANYONING: Now, if you’re like I was, you’re asking, what is canyoning? In a nutshell, it what’s you used to do in the neighborhood creek/river when you were a kid, but on an extreme level.

We were picked up by our canyon guides out front of our hostel. Our group added on two more people, a guy from California on the tail-end of his honeymoon (but the wife didn’t want to come), and a German backpacker girl. The two tour guides rode up front. The passenger passes back a waiver for us to sign, while the driver slams in a techno tape and we hit the road to the canyon site.

We don’t talk much until we get there, where we’re fitted up for wetsuits. This is the third time I’ve put on a wetsuit on this trip, so I now know I wear a size 4. At this point, I’m still not quite sure what we’re getting into, but as I strap on a climbing harness, I assume it will be fun. The guides introduce themselves as Swedes who have been doing this for quite some time. They apologize in advance for their “Swinglish” and tell us to make them repeat themselves if we don’t understand them.

Our outfits are capped off by helmets (another “extreme indicator”). Mine is labeled “Elvis”. One of the guides notices I got the Elvis helmet and says “You know, zee King?” as he thrusts his hips around. I laugh and confirm that yes, I am indeed familiar with Elvis.

The trip starts off with a little hike (all hikes are now little compared to our Mt. Doom trip). At the top, we encounter a zip-line. Excellent. Our guide gives us a quick rundown of what to do: “Just run as fast as you can down this hill”. Check. Being the intrepid soul that I am, I decide to go first. I clip on, start running, but apprehensively. After all, I am headed straight down a canyon. Fortunately, the zip line takes hold and carries me across the canyon, a good 80 feet in the air or so.

I come up a few feet short of the end, so the Swede on the other end has to pull me in, chastising me for not running fast enough. I feel a little bad until I see the rest of the group comes up shorter than I did on the line. Suckers.

Next up, we have to rappel into the canyon. Unlike the abseiling we did in the cave a few weeks ago, this was controlled by the guide. All we had to do was walk down the face of the canyon and he would control our descent. This went pretty smoothly, and the group assembled in the canyon.

The basic idea at this point was to simply traverse through the canyon. There was a moderate stream running through it that turned out not to be as cold as I expected. What made this extreme was that we would jump off and slide down everything we could in the process.

Our first stop was a small rock slide, a few feet. The guide shows us how to go down, and once again I end up being the guinea pig. For this slide, I crossed my arms, sat down, and slide down backwards, head-first, into the pool below. This was rather disorienting, shocking, and fun at the same time as the cold water gave me a nice surprise. I was fortunate to be wearing the helmet as I slightly brushed a rock with my head on the way down.

We romped down a few more small slides like this and then came to our first big slide. This one was a good 3 meters or so tall (10 feet) and was a chute of water plunging into a pool below. It was rather intimidating, but the idea was simple: just keep your arms in and legs together and go! This was quite fun, as the slide terminated earlier than I expected and dumped me through the air the rest of the way.

Once we all went down that slide, it was time to learn how to jump from tall places into shallow water. Oh boy. We climbed up a rock face, and after quick instructions, jumped 9 feet (your typical high-dive height) into a 3-foot pool. Basically, you have to make as big of a splash as possible as to slow yourself down as quickly as possible. Seeing as none of us were crippled in the process, I assume we all did it correctly.

The rest of the trip was more of the same. I chickened out on one jump that was too high into too shallow water for my liking. (“If you don’t do this right, you’ll probably get hurt”). No thanks! Fortunately, most of the group chickened out as well so I didn’t feel too bad about it.

One pool we had to do a belly flop into to avoid hitting the bottom. I should have done it on my side as I banged up the boys a little bit as I hit the water. Oof.

We returned, got unsuited, and I laughed as Kun tries to get Dan out of his wetsuit.

JETBOAT: Our next extreme activity today will be Jetboating up the Shotover river. What is jetboating? Take a jetski, make it hold fifteen people and add horsepower to boot, and you have a jetboat. Throw in a clinically insane driver who likes to drive up a narrow river, and you have the Shotover Jetboat.

This was much more commercialized than I expected, with an intro video on the bus and processing that resembled that of a theme park. We meet our driver, who makes the expected “Unfortunately I’m your driver, this is my first day” jokes. I was rather disappointed by the lack of seatbelts on the boat, that meant there was little chance of us getting tossed out. The boat pulled away from the dock, we do some quick manuveurs for the camera, then speed up the river.

The river itself is absolutely beautiful, with the bright blue-green water we saw in the lakes on the way here. Much of the river is surrounded by canyon, which makes for an interesting time while speeding through it at 40mph.

The jetboat itself was quite interesting. It was powered by two supercharged engines, each putting out 250HP or so, giving the boat some 500HP. This sounds like a lot, but for a boat it isn’t all that impressive. The boat itself could operate in about 4 inches of water, which I found very interesting. This was also very useful in the very shallow parts of the river.

One of the trademarks of jetboats is doing the little hockey-stop maneuver where the driver cuts hard to one side and guns it, making the boat spin around in its wake. This is pretty fun the first few times, but gets old after a while.

The trip lasted for about 30 minutes or so, and we head back after that and get some history behind the river in the process.

All in all, the trip was fun but probably the least extreme activity we’ll be doing this weekend. I wish I could drive the boat, now that would be interesting.

CANYON SWING: Apparently, New Zealand has some bored people. There’s no other way they would come up with this stuff. Canyon swinging is our final stop of the day. What is Canyon Swinging? Well, apparently someone got drunk and decided it’d be fun to swing out on a 100-meter cable over a gigantic canyon. Brilliant!

It is basically a really really big version of the swings you rode in the playground as a kid.

We arrive there in one piece in a van that’s been retrofitted with racing-type seats for all of the seats. Whoever installed them was a bad welder and half of them barely held together. Extreme. The employees at this place remind me of aging California surfers.

A brief hike brought us to a interesting little canyon swinging compound, consisting of a few structures barely clinging to the side of the canyon and some interconnecting stairs. The place seemed like it was put together by a skilled craftsman without much engineering background. The cables spanning the canyon were impressive, and we contemplated how the heck they got them installed.

The canyon itself was huge, spanned a few hundred feet from cliff to cliff, and had a small river at the bottom. I didn’t appreciate the scope of the canyon until I saw a kayaker coming down, who was a small dot from where we were standing.

I was second to go in our group. The harness was fairly complicated, complete with shoulder, leg, and waist straps and a lot of buckles and clips. They got it on me quickly enough, and before I knew it I was teetering over the edge of the abyss below. While extreme, these guys had other people to “process” and wasted no time in getting me through. After some thought, I picked my fate as falling backwards off the platform. I can’t emphasize enough how scary this is. Gravity is fast. 9.8 meters/second^2 is very fast. You don’t realize this until you’re plummeting away from a platform, and you temporarily forget you have something to catch your fall.

The freefall was intense, lasted for a good second or two, and then the harness started pulling me in the huge sweeping arc across the canyon. From the platform, you can hear the whooshing noise of the unfortunate swinger (if it isn’t masked by screaming) as they careen across the gap. Once I was settled into the swing, the rest was pure fun once my adrenaline flattened out.

It was definitely a great way to kick off our extreme weekend.

On the ride back, we get out of the van, only for me to realize that I have left my camera behind somehow. I panicked, because that little thing is my lifeblood (if you haven’t noticed by now). There is a noticeable gap in the pictures that night, but hopefully I’ll find it tomorrow.

Cheers,

--P