Canyoning and the blue mountains

After my skydive i caught the train up to the Blue Mountains and stopped off in a town called Katoomba at the Youth Hostel and enjoyed a well earned nap - aren't afternoon powernaps the best-.
Decided to go for an evening walk and enjoyed the view, although a little cloudy was amazing, to explain it i would say that as you get to the end of the town the cliff goes down a good few hundred metres and you look out over a large grand canyon kind of place just rather than all dry red stone this ones full of trees and streams and waterfalls. Their are staircases which spiral down hundred and thousands of stairs into the canyon - or you can take the lazy option of the cable car. As i said the view was spoilt a bit by the clouds but i'm glad i saw it then as the next 2 days i spent there the cloud was so low you wouldn't have even known there was anything out their, the cloud filled up the whole canyon.

So the next day i went on my abseiling and canyoning adventure. The morning was easy enough with a 5m abseil, a 15 m and a 30m just to get us all used to the feel of the abseil then we got fully kitted out with our wetsuits, harnesses, rucksacks, helmets and waterproof bags and headed to the canyon. For those of you who don't know canyoning is basically getting from one end of a canyon to the other no matter what's in your way. This particular canyon we started of climbing in the river (lowest part is safest as you cant fall any more) over, rocks of various sizes, tree stumps, logs etc before we made it to our first jump. To avoid going too deep into the water we didn't jump pencil style and obviously bellyflops are never a good idea so the first jump of about 8 foot was backwards, lots of fun. The rest of the way down was a mixture of swimming, climbing, wading, jumping, sliding and all in all fun and not really too risky then we got to a big pool and the ropes sent up for our last decent, a 30 m abseil over a waterfall, now as i said we did the abseils in the morning and not to much problem, just trust the rope and off you go but over a waterfall is a bit different, the wall is unbelievably slippery, the rope tougher to pass through the equipment and man the water pounding on your head is not only really noisy but kind of cuts into you in places, so it was a real challenge to get down and then a big slide down the rope at the end and into the pool below. The day was lots of fun and thankfully we got finished before the rain came as that can make the water levels rise even more and make things much trickier for canyoners. The only problem i can see with canyoning is that you start at the top of the canyon and finish at the bottom which generally means you got a big walk back to wherever you came from which we all found as we trudged up the hundreds of steps in gear of many levels of dampness (dry bags are not as dry as the name suggests). Then back to the centre for a well earned beer and to get out of the rain. Next stop Sydney.