We woke up early early to make a 9:00 flight to Sydney. Flying into Sydney was pretty wild as the airport is located right along the water. Especially since I was not near the window, I was convinced we were about to land in the Pacific and be washed up on the shore of a mysterious island home to a large black murderous cloud. But, no worries, we landed and hopped on a bus that took us to our hotel.
Sydney is truly a unique city. The first thing I noticed was the extremely interesting architecture that nearly every building had. No two buildings are alike and not one building is like anything I have seen before. So now we have arrived in our 80 story hotel (one of the tallest in Sydney) and are getting a massive rundown on the current and next few days. We also met the other 30 kids that did not come to Fiji, including my roommate Sahill, who is going to be fun to live with.
We had a few hours to kill before we had to meet up for dinner, so we walked around the hotel’s block, got a cell phone and checked out some of the shops. Dinner time came and we, as a group, walked to the Inner Harbor (which ironically looks identical to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor) to eat. Sahill, Maxine, A-Lowe and I ate together – Go Maryland – and I tried my first Kangaroo! It tasted like a really soft and tender sort of steak, pretty good. After dinner, we went to the hotel to get ready to go out. One of the trip leaders told us of two bars that are similar to a college bar that we would be comfortable at called Three Monkeys and Murphy’s, so that is where we went and had our fun.
A terrible 6:30am wake up call reminded us that we had to be in the lobby at 7:00am for a two hour bus ride to the Blue Mountains of New South Whales. The Blue Mountains are similar to the Grand Canyons of America, just covered in trees that emit a blue haze over them. Gear was given to us for rappelling down the sides of the cliffs after a small hike. We hiked down through the woods down a hill for about 15 minutes before reaching out destination. Here, we were given instructions and a small cliff to practice on. Two tries there and we were ready for the next level of difficulty - increase from about 10 meters to 30. I rappelled down next to Chicken Shit Sahill. Sorry bud. At the bottom of this cliff was a really creepy and scary ladder that we had to climb up to get back to the base. The ladder was by far scarier than rappelling, or so I thought. We had lunch and hung out on the mountain before moving to the final, tallest cliff.
I originally wasn’t going to do the tallest one because I was just somewhat bored with it. At the very last minute Lauren and I decided that we ought to just go for it and so we did. This one would be very very different than the other two. We would be going face first with our chest facing the ground about 60 meters (180 feet) from the ground below. I got myself pumped up and energetic prior to getting to the edge of the cliff. When it was my turn and I got to the edge… Holy shit was I high. I was talking to the pro why anyone would choose to do this. I couldn’t understand why someone would see a 200 foot cliff and want to scale it. Oh I forgot to mention that the cliff is only about 10 feet or so before the overhang comes and you are floating down the rest of the cliff. I grew some big balls and went for the kill and made my way down; slowly at first, faster towards the end. It was real fun and I was real real glad I conquered that beast of a rock.
Our bus arrived in Sydney around 6:00 or so, just in time for cleaning up and getting dinner. Sahill and I went out with some chicas to a sushi place. Plates sit on a conveyor and go around the bar and you choose whatever looks good. We ended up sitting at a table, but that did not stop me from eating a massive amount of sushi. I was the clear victor with 11 plates of sushi and I can tell that since sushi is everywhere in Australia, I will be eating heaps more.
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