Yesterday a select few of us elite athletes decided to go and visit a tree-top adventure course, very similar to Go Ape in Margam Park with a few significant differences. The main difference is that this one was designed by someone who was very drunk on calvados at the time by the looks of it.
I managed to carry my camera around the entire course and have a few photos which I took on the ‘blue’ and ‘green’ difficulty courses. By the time I got to ‘red’ I had to hold on and concentrate a lot more, and once I got to ‘black’ I’d forgotten who I was.
All started off well, a unusual down-hill section was a bit tricky as shown in the photo above, but the first two sections were no worse than Go Ape. Oh yes, apart from the amusing Snowboard section on which I got stranded due to my pulley catching on the return guide rope – I was standing between two trees around 50 metres apart, right in the middle, on a snowboard suspended on two wires. Josh attempted to pull me back but didn’t have the weight to manage it so a Spiderman-like course attendant helped instead. Once we hit the red course, Diarra’s Tarzan calls started to sound more like a 14 year old girl at a Take That concert and for good reason – pain… the course didn’t just get higher, it got increasingly more physically strenuous so once off the red course I jumped straight in to the black one without stopping to think… just in case.
The black course started off with a rope ladder…… on an under-hang. Once you made it to the uneven ledge at the top of that, you had to negotiate several braces hanging from ropes, each on too far to easily reach. Next was a 15ft climbing wall to a bridge. The bridge itself had to be traversed on a bike which if you didn’t pedal, wouldn’t make it all the way. You try riding a bike on a bridge two-feet wide and fifty-feet up. Next up were more braces on ropes, only a little easier this time as you could do a left-foot, right-foot approach. Now came the interesting part. I say interesting, I mean bl**dy difficult part. Seven logs hanging horizontally by a rope attached in the centre – the idea is to use upper body strength to grab the ropes and jump from log to log. Sounds simple, easier to cheat and just hang in your harness and pull yourself along. The course supervisor advised us that the record for that section is 6 seconds – funnily enough he happened to hold that very record. Most people crossed it in about 5 minutes apart from Mat who took 25 minutes whilst he ‘rested his muscles’ and let a few people go across in front of him.
To get down from the black course you attached yourself to another rope, and the course supervisor gently lowered you down, as demonstrated by Diarra in this video:
