A few weekends ago, I checked out the Moomba Festival celebrating the community of Melbourne city. The highlight: the Birdman Festival. Contestants aim to fly across a river from a platform with their homemade hang-gliders, wings, and whatever costumes they feel like dressing up in. Winners raise money and awareness for charities. Basically, they dress up in ridiculous outfits, get their fifteen seconds of fame, and fly off a platform into water, all for the sake of charity! I didn’t get any good pictures, because they were literally thousands of people there that day. We ended that festival with fireworks off the Yarra River!
Next, we hit up the Ice Lounge, which is pretty much what the name entails. It’s a room where everything is made of ice: furniture, cups, sculptures, walls. The challenge is to spend the full 30 minutes in the room. Apparently most people can’t do it, and anymore than 30 minutes could subject you to hypothermia. The highlight: playing old kid games like Down by the Banks to pass the time. I don’t have pictures of this either; they wouldn’t allow us to take pictures inside.
Over last weekend, I spent time with a campus fellowship on a retreat about an hour and a half away from the city. It was a good time to get away and meet some fellow believers who went to Melbourne. Along being challenged with some very practical sermons, the group went on scavenger hunts, had first-year initiation, and explored the nearby beach. The highlight: trying Vegemite.
It was sooo good.
Last Wednesday, I walked into the Unilodge ground floor, only to find our common area taken over by Aussie animals! I got to hold a baby crocodile and snake, but the highlight was carrying a baby hairy-nosed wombat named Chloe. She was only a few months old, but weighed about a third of me. Baby joeys like her are playful when young, but wombats tend to get very aggressive when older. If you hit one with your car, expect your bumper to be a goner.
Now, for the highlight of highlights: this past weekend’s mountaineering trip. Yes, that’s right, I joined the Mountaineering Club. We camped out at the Cathedral Ranges, which is a few good hours away from the city, for a few days to do some exploring of nature. The last time I went camping was in Africa, so the whole setting up the tent and sitting around the campfire brought back some good memories.
The first morning, I went rogaining. It really has nothing to do with hair. What happens is you have a map that looks like this,
and you basically make your way around the map trying to get as many points as you can in the allotted amount of time (for us, 3 hours). The hard part is that each location is at a very random spot like the middle of a forest, and there are no trails that lead to it. Instead, you use the contour lines in the map to imagine what type of landscape they’re in, like a valley or mountain. Instead of signs, you use rivers, edges of the forest, crossroads or any natural landscape as markers. You can’t go straight to the location either, you have to go up to this river, then left 2 degrees south west until you hit this crossroad, then go directly west until you find it In other words, getting lost is inevitable. Following a compass that’s even one degree off means you won’t find it. Instead of signs, you use rivers or crossroads. After getting one of the locations, our team got lost in the forest for a good two hours trying to find our way around this:
We ended up being in the negative side of points, but I would like to point out that we were severely hampered by this unfortunate event at the beginning of the trek:
In the afternoon, we went outdoor rock climbing. It took a good half hour of bouldering and climbing a mountain to get to the climbing site. At one point, we had to climb a wall 20 feet high with nothing but a rope (we weren’t harnessed in). Each rope climb ranged in difficulty and height. There were definite moments of panic as I clung to the wall, looked down and saw hundreds of feet of rocky mountain below me, but as scary as this was, it was heaps fun!
On the last day, we went bushwalking, which is just the Aussie way of saying hiking. It was a good four hours of hiking along this ridge:
I’ve been on hikes before, but this was no ordinary hike -- it was pretty much all bouldering. According to Wikipedia, bouldering is "a style of rock climbing undertaken without a rope and normally limited to very short climbs over a crash pad so that a fall will not result in serious injury." Obviously, we went without that mat. There was one specific place forever etched in my memory where the trail disappeared into a bundle of boulders and rocks that I had to slowly climb over slowly, being careful not to slip or fall over the cliff to my left.
Here’s a map (the trail in red) and description of what I climbed:
Overall, this trip was the most exercise I’ve had in…ever. But the scenery I explored was completely worth it. Looking back and knowing that I climbed/bouldered/hiked that is an amazing sensation. And the fact that this mountain was so massive and the scenery so intensely beautiful reminded me that there has to be something so much bigger and so much more glorious that created it.
Anyone up for an adventure like this with me?!
No comments:
Post a Comment