Kids and Water...They Love It!

Too many days of loitering in Queenstown without doing something "xtreme dude!" gets a man feeling antsy, but bungee just wouldn't cut it. I'd been meaning to try the sport of canyoning for a while and as luck would have it the town of Wanaka is meant to be a base for one of the best places to try it. As a result Tuesday morning found us on the road at an extreme hour leaving Queenstown ready for me to join a group and go up then down Big Nige, the Niger canyon running off the Southern Alps. Leaving Rach after the recommended hearty breakfast, we threw ourselves into a van for the 40 minute drive to the valley floor, grabbed a load of very heavy wetsuits and safety kit and clambered uphill. Already I was grateful not to have tried to persuade Rach to come, without contemplating what was in store once we were wet. The girl in question was in fact in the middle of a maze in Puzzleworld, and we had agreed that if she was not there to meet me at the end of the day I would follow the trail of crumbs and find her...

Canyoning is essentially the sport of finding your way down a steep river course with rope, descender and a dose of madness and allows you to relive of all the fun things of being a kid; water, height and bravado! Once we had donned thermal vests, thick wet suits, booties, wetsuit hats, helmets, shoes, jackets and climbing harnesses, we were overheating and dying to get soaked. The 5 of us in the group, led ably by our guide James, scrambled, slid and jumped our way down the 4 hour course involving regular and forward abseil, diving down chutes and jumping from waterfalls up to 13m high! The trip ended with a death slide across the gorge to get down for tea and medals, completing an exhilarating day where we were all allowed to push our own envelope with safety, saw some stunning hidden scenery and learnt more of kiwi history and geography. Those blokes back home standby to get roped in for some good wet playtime!

On a lesser note, the rigours of travel have started to play hell with our camping gear. With a leaky mattress, rips in the chairs and a cooly bin suffering from early global warming, we fear our procurement policy is coming home to bite us in the ass! Hey-ho, on on!

The "Xtreme" maze at Puzzling World. Actually very hard to find your way around, with lots of lost kids and befuddled old folk to be navigated as well.