Randwick Race Course

One day afternoon we headed over to the race course across the street from campus for their monthly free race day! Australia is known to be competitive in their horse racing so it seems fitting to visit the horse races at least once. The racecourse has a dress code to adhere to, no jeans, no shorts and for their members it is much stricter. We dressed in some dresses and headed on over. 

The track is beautiful! A perfect green along the inside, really nice restaurants and colorful flowers decorating in between.

I bet a dollar on a couple of horses and unfortunately didn't win anything. That's what you get for picking based off name and color. I will never bet loads of money with my tactics, that would be basically handing my money to someone else.

Canyoning!

The other weekend, canyoning happened. I was advised by some locals that I should check it out and it would be worth the exuberant price to go with a commercial group, and they were more than correct. It was a full day of adventure, facing my light fear and great respect for heights.  I convinced a friend to join me and we both questioned our judgment more than once during the trip. I didn't really take pictures, unfortunately. My hands were a little preoccupied with not dieing. But I found some online to show you what I did this weekend!

When we first arrived in the morning, it was cold and humid. This was the view we had of the valley…

We made sure to have on safe harnesses and helmets before beginning!

We weren’t quite sure what we got ourselves into but with our gear on we were pretty excited

We stared Abseiling at a place called Boar's Head. I drew on this picture for you! First of all we started at the top and abseiled to a little path between there, that was 30meters. We walked around the backside of that boar's head rock, attached to a safety line because there was only like a foot and and sometimes less of ledge. Then we walked into a wind tunnel thing where the top of the second red line is. It was like two feet wide maybe with a crack down the middle that went forever in some places. We abseiled again through a 2 foot thick crack for 15meters. Then at the start of the yellow line we abseiled down that smooth rock for 25 meters, but as you can see there was a lot more below that. It was crazyness and then we had to walk up and rock climb a little to bet back to the top. Twas awesome!

Luckily the sky cleared up so we could get some spectacular views while we were hanging from ropes!

We had an amazing day of livin on the edge (literally).

Then we put on wetsuits and went to a canyon. It was basically walking through a river. We had to jump of large rocks into pools to get through. The canyon is like a picture of the past, what the major fauna was like earlier in geologic history when Australia was a part of a bigger land mass and was further south, therefore cooler and wetter so it was all this rainforest area, now it only exists within the canyons here in the Blue Mountains. But the water was cold because it spends a lot of time underground and away from sunlight. So after going down this river, canyon for a while swimming and jumping and things it ended in a waterfall that we abseiled down. I included a picture but it's hard to really see how big and beautiful it was. The water was pounding on your head while you were trying to remember what to do with the ropes and keeping your feet on the slippery rocks. It was exhilarating!