Downstream

The name Waitakere translates as - and forgive me for being rather vague - something involving water falling off mountains, although the specifics change a little depending on whom you ask. The Waitakere Ranges are located only around a thirty or forty minute drive North West of Auckland's commercial district, and so could be considered almost a suburb unto themselves. Lush green woodland lies thick over the mountains here - interspersed with dew-damp meadows, and sparkling streams threading down through the rocks of the mountainside. This is a beautiful, fertile land - in stark contrast to the parched landscapes of Australia, where even areas where the greenery was abundant seemed to exist in some sort of compromised form, enduing constant battles with its inhospitable environment.
There are waterfalls here in the Waitakere of course as the name suggests, and it is here that we are to be spending the day. Gary and I have been canyoning before - the last time in Ecuador where after an exhausting but exhilarating day, our tour guide informed us that we were now "at a professional standard", something which we thanked him for but did not believe for an instant - hence the reason why neither of us has made a career out of it since.
Canyoning, is the term used to describe the activity of making one's way to the top of a waterfall system and then working down it by way of abseiling or by other, simpler means. The Blue Canyon in the Waitakere Ranges is a simpler proposition than the waterfall we navigated in Ecuador which we navigated by means of abseiling alone. Here there are lower falls and deeper splashpools, so the amount of hanging by rope over gaping precipices is kept to a minimum and simply jumping off the edges into the pools beneath proves to be the more practical option.
Our guide is Neil, who is pleasant and good humoured and thankfully seems more familiar with this line of work than either Gary or I, despite our unimpeachable qualifications. He leads us down the mountainside with instructions on how each jump should be made.
"This one," he says, striking a pose on a ledge overlooking blue sky and distant woodland and nothing else, "is a controlled jump. Jump from about here, where I've put that really small leaf, and bend your legs slightly as you go."
Although all of the jumps are actually pretty safe, it is the ones with the specific instructions which seem the trickiest when the time comes to stand on the edge and to actually see how far your fall will be. Particularly when the leaf in question keeps drifting off in the breeze.
It is strange that on occasions when you climb to high, exposed places, you often feel as though you do not quite trust yourself to remain safe and secure. As though something inside might make you irrationally succumb to some deep-seated lemming-like instinct to leap into oblivion in the misguided belief that you may either fly or bounce or some cheerful combination of the two. However standing on the edge of a waterfall, looking at the splash pool not really so far beneath you but looking dizzyingly so by virtue of perspective, the final push to actually make that jump requires a remarkable amount of mental effort. It is as though your centre of gravity has dropped to your feet and will keep you on solid ground as long it it possibly can.
It is reassuring, perhaps, that when the proverbial push comes to the proverbial shove, self-preservation can and will glue you to the landscape to such an extent that a push or a shove might actually be necessary for a jump to be made.
But, jump we do. And fun it is.

These of course, are undemanding jumps when put in perspective of New Zealand's extensive catalogue of big-things-to-jump-off, but they are massively enjoyable regardless.
There are those, I know, who look at this sort of activity and cannot quite get past the "why", but other than that reassuring confirmation of your sense of self-preservation, there is definitely something exhilarating about giving up control to the elements. Falling is terrifying - this is true - but landing safely and getting away with it tempers it into something more like elation. Even if the water which greets you in a sudden uprush is bitterly, bracingly cold, the elation is good and makes it all worth while.

In this case, to add variety, some of the jumps are not jumps at all, but slides down natural rock water flumes, either forwards or one one occasion, backwards - which certainly ratchets up the anticipation given that it is impossible to see how close or how far the water is as it rockets towards you.
We stop for lunch at the foot of one of the abseiling cliffs, cracking open the waterproof lunch bags we have been lugging around with us, each containing tough canisters which we open to find a welcoming (and thankfully dry) picnic of bread rolls and pumpkin humous with ham and cheese.
Neil recounts what sounds like an oft-told story about sitting in exactly the same spot with another group, when the foliage of a nearby tramping path began to rustle and a quintet of elderly men wearing nothing but hiking boots ambled out, waved nonchalantly and then disappeared into another path-way on the other side of the creek. It is possible, of course, that they too were startled to find a group of people in matching black-rubber head-to-toe outfits dining on humous sandwiches in the middle of nowhere, and that the event might have become a you'll-never-believe-what-we-just-saw anecdote of their own.
After lunch we continue down through further jumps, slides and abseils, and on finally reaching the bottom, follow the path of the river back to the footpath which will take us to the carpark where Neil left his minibus.
The weather, still early in New Zealand's spring, is warm and sunny enough to counteract the cold of the water, and we tramp back through the woodland paths to the bus, cheerfully anticipating the aching limbs and blossoming bruises which the morning will no doubt bring. Worth it, we decide without question. Definitely worth it.