I got up at 7am and made a coffee. Then I lay down and got back up again at 9am. Feeling better but still tired. I Skyped into Sarah D, who is in Sheffield England, and who I will be catching up with whilst I am there. Sarah was a turtle program volunteer for Care for Hedland Environmental Association in 2010-11 when I met her, as she was billeted to my place for part of her stay. She’s been busy lately so it will be great to catch up before she possibly moves to Spain soon. We had a good old natter.

I then headed out to arrange to go to do some ziplining (riding a flying fox). There were four options, and I chose the most basic one, the ”Bear” course. Interestingly, my whole group was from Australia. One young lady from Brisbane, and four girls and their mother from New South Wales. These latter family were here for 5-6 weeks, as the girls (I guess between 11-14 years old but I could be wrong) are all really good skiers and have won gold medals in Australian competitions. The mother showed us a video of one of them and she was really good.

We hopped into the tour van and headed up the mountain, past the Whistler Sliding Centre, where I was hoping to go tomorrow for a ride on either the skeleton or the bobsleigh on the 2010 Olympic track. There’s so much to do here! Anyway, we got up to an A frame building and went inside whilst our two guides arranged the gear for us. We then got into the gear, which included the straps and brackets etc. to hold us onto the steel cable (zipline). We left all our gear there (I left my Canon as it was bulky but I brought my GoPro with me, attached to its head strap.

We then got our instructions, and headed off to the first of the 5 ziplines we would take. I was pretty sure I’d need someone to actually push me off to go over. I ended up going last on this first one, and saw it was fine for the others, so decided it was fine, then walked off the steps and “flew”. I had strapped my GoPro around my hand so I could video as I moved, and so I have some video of 4 of the 5 ziplines. The 4^th line was interesting because it looked like you were going down, but the second half was upwards, so you had to bend your knees and get into a ball to make all the way to the other side. So I couldn’t video that one and wrap myself at the same time. Everyone made it across, but mainly because the guide receiving us was able to push the “brake” outwards along the zipline to capture the shackle of the person coming in (if they didn’t look like they’d make it), and pull them in.

Herewith a few photos taken from the video I shot (clipped from video using Nero 2017).

The fourth photo has my foot in it. This was on the last line, and there was a competition between the others to do an upside down ride on the line. I was a bit too old for that (or at least my back feels old), so I did “the floppy salmon” ride instead, where you flop around like a salmon or a worm. Needless to say, I didn’t win. All in all, it was great fun. I felt great all the way through, and went back to the hotel at about 3pm and read and watched TV through until around 9pm when I went to bed.