Back in Sydney, we spent a day at the Blue Mountains which is an hour or two outside of the city. It is incredibly beautiful, and what's even more amazing is that it's so close to a major city.

Here we learned to abseil, which is basically descending a rope by being attached to a harness. In this picture, we were getting ready to go down.

It's really fun to go down. You have to be careful or you can end up losing control and knocking yourself against the rocks. This descent was about 50 feet.

It gets a little harder to remain steady when there are no rocks next to you.

Those pictures above were all of us training to abseil. We did that for the first few hours. We spent the remainder of the day canyoning. We used the abseiling skills we learned above only as a means to get us lowered 50 feet into a narrow chasm. Once in the chasm, you swim and hike through absolutely STUNNING treks. Unfortunately, because you're submerged in water for part of the time, you can't bring a camera. However, it is one of the coolest things I've experienced in Australia. Below is a picture I found on the internet of canyoning in the Blue Mountains. This is something everybody should try!!!