Canyoning

My friend Lisa has been bugging us to go on this rope adventures trip. Someone told her it was like a rappelling ropes course and that you only got a little bit wet. This was a problem for me as any natural water on this island is waaaaay too cold for me to get in. Even the swimming pools are freezing. I begrudgingly agreed because the ropes part sounded fun, the water part, not so much! When we arrived and they handed us wet suits I questioned the water part. The guide laughed at me and told me we would be getting very wet and tried to tell me the water was not that cold. I laughed at him. It was at this point I realized my friends lied to me! We were apparently getting soaked. I also learned that we were not in fact rappelling, we were canyoning, which involved some rappelling. Canyoning is where you travel down the distance of a canyon overcoming any obstacles by swimming, climbing, jumping and rappelling.

The very first obstacle we came to was a rock slide that we would have to slide down into a deep pool of water. It was steep and the end of the slide jerked to the right and seemed to really jar your body a bit going down. I was not liking this! Here it is...

 I skipped that one because the guide told me it was the worst one and there was a way around. After that we hiked down a bit and went into the canyon deeper and then came to a cliff we had to jump off into the water. The guide totally had my number. He lied! That first thing was not the worst, but now he had just made me hike down into a canyon and I didn't have a way back out or around and so off the rock I went. Here is Shelby jumping off that rock, I didn't get my picture taken because I just went for it as soon as my feet hit the rock, before I had time to think about the cold water below and chicken out.

Soon after that rock we got to the rappelling part and then I was happy and having a lot of fun. Despite having a miserable cold also it turned out to be a very fun day. I was cold the entire time, despite the guide swearing to me the wet suit was warm, but I survived. I hope they have something like this in Guam because that will be awesome! Here are the rest of the pictures from our trip.

Canyoning Agualva