Blue Mountains, abseiling

The Blue Mountains are only a 2 hour train ride from Sydney. We came into the town of Katoomba (how fun is that to say?) at around 10 PM so we could get an early start. The youth hostel we stayed at was really nice. Kind of like a big frat house, but cleaner and without all the pretentiousness. They had a big screen TV, pool table, kitchen where you could cook your own food, and board games. After we got back from abseiling (don’t worry, I’ll explain what that is in a bit), we played a game called “Speed Scrabble.” Basically, each player pulls tiles from the pile and tries to use them all in their own little Scrabble game. The first one to use all their tiles says, “GO!” and everyone pulls another tile, and so on until all the tiles are gone and someone can use all the ones they have. I made us play about 4 extra rounds because I hadn’t won. I got stuck with the Q TWICE!! Never got a single U to go with it. That’s just not fair. Anyway, on to the abseiling.

To us in the States, abseiling is repelling, as in off a cliff. According to our guide, the German and the French started doing this sort of stuff at the same time. “Rapel” comes from the French word for, well…rapelling, and “abseiling” is German for “down rope.” We signed up for the entire day package so we started early. The cool thing was that the four of us (Ana, Leslie, Leslie’s friend Lynn, and myself) were the only people in the group for most of the day. It was like having a private instructor. There was another girl from Denmark, I think, who was with us in the morning. She enjoyed the beautiful mountain scenery and fresh air by having a cigarette every five minutes. Some things I’ll never understand.

The weather kinda sucked. It was about 50° F, windy, and overcast all day. And I mean hella windy. Dangling off the side of a 30 meter cliff doesn’t help, know what I’m sayin’? We started with 15 and 30 meter cliffs in the morning. The best part was the 60 meter cliff we did in the afternoon. That’s over 200 feet, y’all! Actually, the 30 meter was scarier because the first few steps (the hardest ones to begin with) were blind because the ledge receded right after a foot or two. After starting, going down was easy—gravity did all the work. The girls had a harder time getting started because they weighed less (that gravity thing) and 60+ meters of rope weighs a lot. To let yourself drop you have to move the rope from behind your hip out to your side. It can take some effort, especially at the beginning. I have a video of it…click here if you want to see it.
(WARNING: The file is pretty big (14 MB)…you might want to download it somewhere with a fast connection.)
(Also try to right-click and choose "Save target as...")

The really hard part was the hike back up the mountain. It was 7 minutes of uphill hiking up narrow paths over rocks and trees. It took so long to get up that everyone behind you had already gone by the time you got back to the top. You got there just in time to hook up and go again. We all had to help get all the ropes and harnesses together in order to beat the rainstorm we could see coming through the valley. Needless to say, we were all pretty pooped that night. Leslie and Lynn stayed another day for a hike, and Ana and I came back to Sydney. It seemed like a lot longer than a one day trip. Tons of fun!