One of my favorite days – Canyoning

Canyoning, as the name would imply, is when you basically walk down a canyon, river, rocks, cliffs, and all, and repel down waterfalls when the river disappears beneath your feet.  It is great fun.

At first it sounded a bit sketch, I remember zip lining in Costa Rica, where I wouldn’t call the safety standards -- stringent.  The cables were wrapped around trees, rotting wood, didn’t matter.  Anyways, who knew what repelling down a waterfall would bring.

From the moment I met my guide I knew it was going to be a great time, he was an Austrian named Wolli, spoke in a funny almost Pee-wee Herman (but not annoying), high pitched voice, and he seemed to bounce from word to word.  My fellow adventurers were named Arne, Lukas, and a girl I don’t remember (she wasn’t very friendly), two were from Germany and another from Austria.

The day before it had rained and was cold, but today the clouds cleared and it was perfect conditions for getting wet.  After getting dressed head to toe in neoprene, we began marching through the jungle, barely following a trail.  Eventually the trail disintegrated into us just walking down the river.  It was sick.

We worked on our technique by sliding down slippery sections:

Acrobatic maneuvers to overcome difficult sections:

And use ropes to get down the 20 to 30 foot waterfalls:

Two of the waterfalls were pretty easy, well as easy as doing something I’ve never done before, 30 feet off the ground, getting hit in the face with freezing water can be….  The second one was actually tough, had to deal with a large lip right at the top of the cliff, then transition from one rock face to the one adjacent, all while getting pummeled by water:

During the whole middle section the river basically turned into a cave, almost no light could get in, the water got very narrow and deep in the middle, so we used our arms and feet to straddle the water and stay dry.  It was incredibly fun, I tried to get a few pics, but the camera was getting incredibly wet and foggy:

  

It was a super fun day, one of my favorites.  It started to get cold after a few hours in the wet wetsuits, but our driver brought us hot tea and cookies when he picked us up.  A great end to a great day.