Let Sleeping Gods Lie

That morning we were anxiously awaiting our transport to the Sleeping God canyon. When it arrived we did a quick round of introductions, our fellow adventurers were a Chilean, an Englishman and an Australian couple. Our guides were Connie, who was also from Chilli, and Craig who was a Kiwi (so he was from NZ, he wasn't a bird or a fruit or anything. Not from what we could see anyways.) but who also lived in Chilli for years.
They drove us to Kauearea park, where they kicked us out of the van at the DOC headquarters warning us that this would be the last toilet break for the day. After a race to the bathrooms and everyone was done and ready to go we drove up to a hiking track. Here they equipped us with a wetsuit, helmet, diaper and a non-matching pair of plastic shoes. They told us that the hike would be pretty tough but to keep in mind that every Meter up also meant another Meter down, this was supposed to boost our morale but since I had a pretty good idea of how far we'd go down I also knew how much we had to walk up (I judged it to be between 200 and 300 Meters).
As we sweated our way up the hill we stopped every 20 minutes to let the Australian girl catch up, by the time she caught her breath the Chilean reached us as well and we continued. By the end of our hike the Chilean was on the verge of collapse. Poor guy.
The first abseil was just a baby one and you could almost walk down it, flat as it was and this made it a lot harder than normal. I was the first to go down, and having abseiled a couple of times before I was pretty confident, but as I would soon find out this confidence was unfounded. As I lowered my body into a position perpendicular to the slope, I started to feed my 8 ring some rope, causing me to go down. I took a few steps as I did this and quickly realised I was walking down faster than I was feeding the rope and was now almost vertical again. I quickly pushed a larger amount of rope up and bounced down, almost losing my footing and scampering to the side a bit to regain my balance. Obviously this was too fast, so I tried to go slower and soon found myself standing upright again. It wasn't until the end of this little hill that I managed to find the middle way and come down in a semi-controlled manner.
After this we reached our second abseil which was a bit higher and a lot steeper, and therefore easier. First Craig went down and hooked up a rope along which Connie lowered the bags we carried with us, after the bags were down the way was clear for us. This one went a lot smoother and I started to regain trust in my abseiling. Me and Jasper were the first ones down and as we were waiting for the others Craig pointed to a small ledge halfway up the slope and told us we could jump off there if we wanted. Being two chickens with a fear of heights we of course accepted immediately and scaled up. I was up first and as I stood there looking down my knees started to shake and the only thing going through my mind was "Oh god, that's high!". It was only 6 meters up but it seemed at least five times as high, and on top of that you had to make sure you jumped as far from the ledge as you could or risk hitting the side. After a second or two I mustered all my courage and leaped off as far as I could, instinctively screaming my lungs out. I was so scared that I climbed up and jumped again.
Afterwards was the big abseil, 70 meters down slippery wet rock with water splashing in your face. The slope wasn't completely vertical though, and there was a part in the middle which was almost like a plateau, after which it dropped straight down again creating a sharp edge with the capability of cutting a rope. Because they didn’t want their expensive ropes to get ruined, and also a bit because they didn't want us to die, they put a plastic sheet over the edge and told us to make sure we passed over the plastic on our way down. Jasper went down first, and I quickly followed. Jaspers rope was on my right side and I had to make sure I didn't step over it, or the lines might get entangled, this meant however that I was forced to go down the left side of the slope which seemed to be a lot trickier. After stumbling once or twice on the slippery rock I got to the plastic sheet and carefully made my way over it. When I made it over I looked up to check that my rope was actually over the plastic and not in a position where it could break and send me plummeting to my death. To my horror I saw that the rope wasn't on the sheet but on the hard sharp rock. As visions of a horrible fall flashed before my eyes I urged myself to go down the line as straight as possible and pray that the rope would hold up long enough for me to get down safely. I slowly and carefully made my way down, and just before the end the wall suddenly became surprisingly slippery causing me to lose my footing. They had warned us before we went down about the ability of the rope to act as a sort of rubber band and that the trick was to let your weight rest on it the entire time. Now, as I regained my footing and tried to lean back into my harness I saw what they had meant. When I rested my full weight onto the rope again it stretched, causing me to lean back further than I had planned and I moved down a few steps to get in a better position. In doing so however I took my weight off the rope slightly and immediately the rope pulled me up, in reflex I hugged the wall and moved my feet up again. This time I tried to put my weight on the rope gradually and again the rope stretched, I managed to somewhat keep my position but the stretch and pull of the rope had me feeling like a yo-yo. As I made my way down the last few meters I was glad to have survived that ordeal and made my way over to Jasper. We were standing there waiting for the others and really started to feel the cold, by the time everyone was down there were 6 people shivering from the cold wetness.
As the guides were pulling down the ropes the Australian guy asked, with a big smile on his face, "Where's the food?". And we, expecting he hid the bag somewhere, started to look around to see where he might have taken it, but when we looked at the faces of Craig and Connie and noticed that they had a serious and slightly shocked look on their face. Turns out, we were supposed to carry the bags down the cliff as well, and not just to the edge of it. So, there were now two bags lying up an impossible to climb 70m cliff wall, one of which contained our lunch for that day and the other contained Connie's bag, and also my bag which contained water and my glasses which I brought in case I lost my contacts. Instead of losing my contacts and having to depend on my glasses, I now lost my glasses and had to hope I didn't lose my contacts.
Slightly disheartened we continued to our next obstacle, the big jump. A 12 meter jump (or abseil if you chose not to jump) down into a small natural pool, with the rock face being at an angle meaning you had to jump away from the wall for at least a meter and a half if you didn't want to crash into the face of the cliff. We all stood there a moment or two, taking in the height of the jump trying to figure out why we paid to do this. Matt, the Englishman, was the first one to push reason into a place where it could do no harm and jump down into the cold water. Next up was the Australian couple and after seeing how close the girl came to hitting the rock it didn't get any easier for us to force ourselves off the cliff. After them came Jasper and then I had to bite the dust. As I made my way down to the point from which everyone jumped I could really see how high it was and how far the cliff stretched out into the pool. I stood there until Craig gave me the okay trying to find the best position from which to jump. I had seen how high it was, but it wasn't until I actually jumped that I realised it and it scared the living hell out of me. I swam over to where the others were sanding and waited for the Chilean to come down, he chose to abseil down and so took a bit longer than everyone else.
The next abseil was called “The widow maker” as 20 people had died there in the last few days. Oh no, wait. I’m thinking of something else. It was actually called “The funnel” and Craig assured us that we’d like it, as he rated it the best one on the mountain. The first part was fairly simple but for the last part you had to descend down the middle of the waterfall. The rocks weren’t as slippery as the ones on the 70m descent, but the difficulty with this one was that it was nearly impossibly to see what was under the water and so just had to pray that wherever you were going to place your foot was a good place for it. Obviously I didn’t pray hard enough as within the first few seconds of abseiling through the roar of the water I extended my foot, expecting to find rock instead finding nothing. It came as a bit of a shock to me as I slowly tilted to one side and toppled over. I quickly got up and did the rest of the descent expecting to step in nothingness every time, but making it down in one piece without further problems.
The last part was an abseil with a surprise (though it wasn’t really a surprise to me as the guy we booked the trip at sort of told us already), the surprise was that halfway through the rope ended and you fell down, gliding gently to the other side in what they called a “Flying fox”. The only thing left after this was a 30 minute walk down the river. As one of my shoes was too small and my feet were killing me and I found this to be the hardest part of the trip by far.
When we got back to Thames the first thing me and Jasper did was go to the local supermarket and buy all sorts of sensible food to still our hunger. This may or may not have included: Chocolate, 2 bags of cookies, 1 big tub of ice cream and 7 hot dogs. Before we rode our bikes back to our Holiday park we quickly downed a bar of chocolate each to silence the beast in our stomachs.
The next day we headed back into town to pick up my glasses, as Connie said she’d go back down the hill to pick up the lost bags and that she’d drop my bag off in Thames. We didn’t do much the rest of the day, except for preparing our trip for the next day.
When we packed up our tent the next day the weather was good, and I was feeling confident about finding a ride to Coromandel town. We quickly made our sign in the kitchen and picked up a nice spot on the side of the road. After about 10 minutes we bagged our first ride, it was a rather eccentric and thoroughly British looking fellow who said he wasn’t going all the way to Coromandel but was willing to take us halfway to Tapu. He dropped us off in a very small town which only had one street, which also happened to be the high-way. It took us a bit longer to get our ride this time (about 20-25 minutes) and wouldn’t you know it, the guy who picked us up was an old Dutchman. Though he’d been living in NZ for the last 50 years or so he still spoke perfect Dutch and was very pleased to learn we were Dutch as well. He even stopped the car for us on top of the hill so we could enjoy the view, and when he dropped us off in Coromandel he told us that if we were going to walk to the Kauri tree they had there we should stop by his house and have some tea.
The next day we walked to the Kauri tree, intending to visit him, but unfortunately couldn’t find his house so we just walked back again.
That evening we spoke to a man from Canada as we were watching an episode from I Shouldn’t Be Alive. He said some friends told him New Zealand was a very good place to cycle around in, but when he got here all he found were hills and roads with no space for cyclers at all. He much preferred Holland.
The next morning we both left and he gave us some pins with the flag of his city and country on ‘em as a small gift, which we thought was quite nice of him.
As we were standing by the exit towards Whitianga with all our stuff and our sign ready, the sky was looking very dark and cloudy and it wouldn’t be long before it dropped its watery load on us. When after about 20 minutes we’d only seen about 4 cars go past we were starting to get worried, but then our troubles were over as a small van stopped for us. It belonged to a young German couple (they were 18 and 19) and the back was filled with a bed and their bags, but we somehow managed to squeeze our bags and ourselves in. In our little shelter against the rain they took us all the way to Whitianga, after we had thanked them we set up our tent in the next Holiday Park.