Canyoning

Canyoning seems to be the top adventure attraction in Da Lat. There's one particular canyon that all the groups go to where there is a good series of waterfalls. Canyoning consists of rappelling (sometimes through a waterfall), watersliding, cliff jumping, and floating your way down the canyon.

I went through the same tour group that did my countryside tour, Groovy Gecko. And one of our guides was the same that I had for my countryside tour, Tam. He's super friendly and was an excellent guide for this as well. If any of you ever end up in Da Lat, this is the tour group to book through. We paid a tiny bit more than the other folks I talked to out there, but we were a group of six, and many of the other groups were around twenty, so we did a lot less waiting around at the top of rappels.

It was a lot of fun. I was good at the rappelling. Emily was one of the only folks to do the eleven-meter cliff jump (I stuck to the seven-meter). Unfortunately, no one was taking pictures at that event. But here she is rappelling down a waterfall:

Jon and Ian often bring up a time when I was younger and wouldn't ride some ride at the waterpark--it was too much for me. But, within that same week, I was having a blast whitewater rafting, even when we wrapped our raft around a rock at the top of a rapid and had to bail to the side of the river, a much more dangerous situation. It's not that I mind the risk, it's that I don't like feeling out of control. So long as I am controlling my descent, I can be very bold--I did a fifteen-meter rappel in just over one jump. But I still hate cliff jumping.

The last waterfall they call the washing machine--you rappel straight down into it until you run out of rope, and then it churns you around and spits you out. I swallowed a fair amount of water on this one.