An unnecessarily dangerous adventure

So we had a free day today. After four luxurious days on a sail boat we thought we would try going a bit more adventurous. We read about this great sounding place called Faralya - described as a beautiful beach town with a 60 metre waterfall where young Turks go to relax. Sounded like our kinda thing!

The drive in the bus to get there was AMAZING. Unfortunately our driver was trying to shorten our lives. The roads were gravel, thin and with 200 metre cliff drops on the right (think the Cliffs of Insanity from the Princess Bride). Cars were driving in both directions, despite most of the way being one car-width only. However, this did not stop our driver from accelerating around corners, passing on the inside, chatting away on his cellphone and hilariously stopping for 10 minutes to chat to his friend on a road side bench. Anyway, we got there eventually. We found our general directions to the beach/waterfall and were greeted with possibly the worst sign in history.

"Waterfall this direction. Somewhere is dangerous. 75 minutes"

What it should have read is "Disappointingly small waterfall is ahead after a dangerous and difficult walk that mainly includes rock climbing. Wear hiking boots. Ropes would be helpful. And by the way the water and the bottom of the waterfall is as near to freezing as is possible. Enjoy"

So we walked out not really knowing what to expect. We decided to go there on via the less dangerous but more lengthy path. Took about an hour and a half. The waterfall was 8 metres tall at best. A beautiful 8 metres, nonetheless, but blatantly not 60 metres. Feeling adventurous and short on time we decided to take the canyon route back down to the beach. This lasted about 7 minutes. We expertly managed some rock climbing and implausible yet possible descents of about 4-5 metres at a time. Then we were confronted with a drop down a sheer face of around 40 metres. We briefly considered WWBGD (What would Bear Grylls Do?). Then decided that as we valued our lives, we would turn around and take the long route home.

We made it back many hours later - what an awesome adventure it turned out to be! Hard work, but generally pretty fun! We remember reading in at the beginning of a Lonely Planet guide that the real travelling adventures start once you´re lost...and that was true for us today!

The beautiful but slightly smaller-than-advertised waterfall

Cam showing off some mad rock descending skills