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Catch Up: Apologies for leaving you blogless for such a long period, I've been in Ho Chi Minh City for the past week which should, and I'm sure would, lend itself to innummerable interesting posts, but any blog from me during this period would have consisted mainly of grunts of pain. This is because in my inimitable way I managed to distend my stomach, allow acid up my oseophagus and cause a inflammation. A side effect was that I couldn't eat anything more solid than yogurt. Anticipating a lack of interest in me being given a entire medicine cabinet to consume whilst worshipping the air-con and cable tv in my hotel room I decided to wait until I got better and moved on to do something, you know, interesting before I posted again. Hence what follows. A moment's silence if you please for my trainers. They have endured constant stresses and abuses and have never been more than aedequate. They were 2 years old already when I went travelling and during the course of my journey I've needed to pay a street cobbler in Dehli to sew them back together. Often people have offered to clean my shoes despite the
fact that they are made of canvas and are more dirt than cloth anyway. While I was walking around Angkor Wat the right shoe got a hole in it which meant that whenever it's rained since I've been performing a weird hopscotch around puddles to avoid getting my socks wet. However I'm afraid that my shoes and I may have reached a parting of ways. As I write they are in my room, sodding wet, attempting to dry out and if they are still wet in the morning then the time will have come for me to let go.
The reason they are sodding wet is because I went canyoning today. For those of you who don't know canyoning is an activity created by an individual who thought that abseiling down steep cliffs was a bit dull on it's own and that it really needed an extra dimension to push it into leg-lockingly terrifying territory. Their answer to this conundrum was water. I'm in Da Lat at the moment which is really a poor man's Darjeeling and once I arrived I was at a loss with what to do with the single day I have here. After a few
enquiries I learnt it was a choice between canyoning or a tour of the local farms. Now if there's anything that can drive me down a waterfall suspended by a bit of rope it's the prospect of a day visiting agricultural establishments that have been extruded into tourist attractions. So gulping down my stomach I handed over $26 and signed myself up for a half day of the wet and wild.
I should mention at this point that I had prior warning of what to expect from Yvonne, who has now sadly bundled herself off to China. She went up to Da Lat while I was exploring all foodstuffs less viscous than soft cheese in Saigon, and she went canyoning too. She said it was really scary, and went into loads of vivid detail about the waterfall and how loads of people slipped. This was churning around my mind all night.
The only time I've been abseiling before was on a church choir excursion to an adventure park. I think I was about ten. The abseiling itself consisted of me walking down a perfectly flat vertical wall with an extra grippy surface. Generally speaking nature doesn't provide such
surfaces. Another aspect of my youthful excursion with abseiling was that I had to walk slowly down the wall taking very small steps and never letting the rope run through my hand. The canyoning instructor wanted me to take a slightly different approach. In the training session he insisted we practise letting the rope run through our hands and jumping away from the wall and moving quickly down. Initially I couldn't see the reason for this, surely I could just walk down like I did when I was ten? No, I couldn't. On our first proper descent, 18m high, there were lots of lovely large holes in the cliff face that had to be jumped over. As I recall my response to coming across the first of these was "Oh My God! No Way!". Clichéd but entirely appropriate I hope you'll agree. On landing at the bottom all my fear and anxiety I'd accumulated had been funneled down to my legs which were shaking quite unpleasantly. I had to sit down for a bit.
However now I knew what to expect I managed the next descent much better and whizzed down. But no one told me that I'd be
landing in water at the bottom. I was so surprised I sat down in the water expecting it to be deep, it wasn't. This was the first of many soakings my trainers received this day.
The big test however was the 25 metre high waterfall we could abseil down. We lunched at the top giving me plenty of time to talk myself in and out of doing it. I'm proud to say I did do it. This was one descent where it was okay to walk slowly, you needed to because the surface was so slippery and the tug of water at you ankles was so strong. The waterfall consisted of two parts, about halfway down it hit a ledge which threw up a huge amount of spray, this coincided with the easiest path down. When I reached this point I was genuinely scared, I didn't know where to look as the spray was getting up my nose and making it feel hard to breathe. I stopped dead and it took me a while to get going again as I wasn't sure if it was going to get any better. The guide then shouted down some advice that eluded
me in my panic: move out of the spray. This worked. Near the bottom the rope ran out and we were supposed to jump away from the cliff, letting go of the rope and landing safely into the pool. As opposed to some of the other people in the group, Kristine for example, a Dane who managed to make her belly flop look extremely graceful, this didn't come easily to me and I kind of scraped against the cliff into the water. As I swam to the bank my left trainer made an unsuccessful bid for freedom. Despite this I really enjoyed it.
We also went down natural waterslides and abseiled into a waterfall that at the bottom turned into something the guide termed "the washing machine", fairly self explanatory. We also had the opportunity to jump off a 7m cliff into a pool below. This was something I didn't do, I'd already scraped myself against one wall I didn't want to repeat the experience without a helmet or any ropes. More truthfully, the mere thought of jumping off tall things gives me the willies. I'll let you know if my shoes pull through.
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