Canyoning

I was sitting in a meeting room on the thirty-fifth floor the other day when suddenly my heart began to hurt.  A British Airways jet had risen from the airport and I watched it circle lazily and disappear over the hazy blue horizon. 

I’ve been missing people a lot recently.  Maybe because so many friends and family have big-0 birthdays this year.  Lots of gatherings of people who it saddens me not to see.  Or maybe because we’ve just celebrated our fifth anniversary of living in Australia and that feels like a long time.  Or maybe no reason.  Anyway, I’m missing everyone and wish so much…well, not that I was there with you but rather that you were here with me.  Blue skies, clear ocean, crashing waves.  You get the picture.  Anyway, back to that hazy blue horizon.  Hazy because of pollution or heat inversion depending on who you talk to.  Blue because of the mountains.  

The Blue Mountains start 50km west of Sydney and shoot up from the Cumberland Plain in a solid wall of sandstone.  The first white settlers considered the mountains “insurmountable” which says more about their arrogance than anything else.  It was only after 20 years of failed expeditions that someone thought to ask the aborigines how they did it.  Easy.  Don’t walk up the valleys as in Europe or America, that way only leads to treachorous cliffs and deceptive dead-ends.  Instead, walk up the ridge lines, the song lines where generations-old songs will guide you the way.  

Still today, asphalt and tarmac smoothing the way, you can see what an incredible job it was to cross the Great Dividing Range, even with that invaluable advice.  The land regularly dips away to reveal infinite eucalypts rolling to the horizon, their leaves reacting with the heat to produce the blue haze which gives the mountains their name.  Every so often, the endless forest is cut by a line of nothing as it falls into a canyon upto 760 metres deep.  Picture that, it’s deep.  Sandstone is soft you see and after ten million years even the tiniest creek can etch deep into the bowels of the earth.  Well, OK, maybe not the bowels of the earth but it certainly feels that way when you’re down there.  Did I mention I went canyoning this week?

At first it felt like a normal bush walk, slugging through the wilderness with heavy packs.  We gawked at the 300 metre cliffs that appeared through the trees and wondered at the silence of the Australian bush (it’s already hot by 9am and all the birds, insects, marsupials, everything is hiding in the shade and trying not to move).  Unlike most walks though,  this one didn’t end when the path disappeared over a ledge.

“Ever abseiled before?” asked my mate Kurt, pulling ropes off his back.  I sort of knew he was an outdoorsy person so was sure it would be fine.  Walking backwards over a cliff ten minutes later I wondered if I should have asked about his qualifications.

At the bottom of the first 20 metre abseil, once I’d stopped kissing the ground and followed Kurt and his mate Zen down the creek until we hit one of those famous dead ends.  Except, what’s that tiny hole under that rock?  That black abyss full of water?  We climbed down into it, the 14 degree water making me gasp.  As instructed I had two layers of thermals on underneath my wetsuit, and as predicted it wasn’t enough.  The woolly hat under my helmet helped, as did the woollen socks inside my shoes.  But after watching me shiver Kurt soon gave me his diving gloves too.  Together with the abseiling harness I looked like I’d walked out of an outdoor equipment store unable to decide what to buy.

It took a while to get used to swimming in a cave that had never seen sunlight but the glow-worms helped, little blue stars littering the ceiling better than an african sky.  Lovely, it’s freezing, let’s go.  And so on (and on) we went.  The sunlight, when we found it again, had turned green through the filter of ancient ferns.  We abseiled again into unknown pools, not combat-style with two wide feet down a flat wall, but crawling and scraping so as not to swing in under the overhang and slam into the jagged rockface underneath.  

We walked the floor of wrinkles two feet wide and a hundred feet high, huge rocks split in two by the gently flowing water.  We found a red-bellied black snake (one of the most poisonous in the world), several spiders, a marsupial that looked like a mouse.  And then more green pools, black swimming caves which probably, hopefully led further down.  

I have never before felt like this - a visitor to a world made neither by nor for humans.  We were alone and far from home down there, freezing in the gloom and looking up at the baking sky.  And oh it was beautiful.  Trees which three hundred years ago had started their journey up to the light buttressed out of the rock above us.  Fish which didn’t know to fear us swam around our feet.  Bright red yabbies, somewhere between a prawn and a lobster, were gnarly and happy to attack intruders.  Our bodies and breath steamed in the green and golden sunlight.

After six hours we splashed out of the canyon and into the main river, its waters joyfully warm after the black creek of the caves.  We swam still deep between red cliffs for an hour or so until at last we found our path.  Then we slogged up the harsh hill, wetsuits wet and clothes damp, back packs heavier than ever.   I am sore all over today and all the happier for it.  Have I ever forgotten to mention before?  Australia is a land of endless beauty.  So, yes I miss you all, but I miss you here, not there.