My trip on Oz Experience began on Tuesday with an early start to meet the tour bus outside my hostel in Sydney at 6.30am. Out of a maximum of 25, there were 15 of us travelling on it, mostly Brits with a few Germans and Swedes. After stopping off at the Oz Experience office on George St., we left the city and headed north to Barrington.
Barrington is about 100km inland and 200km north of Sydney and lies in prime agricultural and gold mining country. It looks a bit like parts of New Zealand or Britain, except with more gum trees and wallabies. Our destination was a small backpackers on the Barrington river, just over the hill from the adjacent national park. It's got a great atmosphere to it, with all the buildings built by hand from local materials by the guys who run it.
Various activities were on offer, with absieling and horse riding, but almost everyone opted for the most interesting of them; white water kayaking... at night! The Barrington river has rapids of grades 1, 2 and 3, which are used by the Australian Olympic team to train on, but they don't go on them in the dark as we did. It sounds like a crazy thing to do and it probably is; this is the only place you can do it in the country.
After a BBQ lunch and a quick practice session on the river, we had a homemade pizza dinner and then headed off to be kitted-up. With wetsuits, helmets, fleeces, life jackets and torches all on, we were ready to go and jumped in the bus to make our way upstream.
Instead of using normal solid kayaks, we had inflatable ones which are more suits to this sort of trip. After hauling them down to the river bank from the bus, we got into the water and were off. You're meant to stay in single file and follow the exact path of the guide in front, but it's practically impossible as people get stuck on rocks and you lose sight of the guide. If you're at the front, you could stay out of trouble, but further back it turned into a guessing game of where the rocks would be and if you could get through.
It was great fun and all but two people managed to stay in their kayaks, even with several collisions and near-misses. Doing it in the day would have been just as good, but the uncertainty added by the night made it that bit more exciting. Even better was the hot tub that you could jump into afterwards!
