Revisiting my youth
The teenage me, that went by the nicknames “mountain woman”, “wild thing”, “Amazon” and whatever else for my outdoorsy inclinations, came out to play on Saturday, and this is what happened. As I climbed over the barrier, designed to prevent people doing this*, I said to my friend – the same friend I scrambled under the gates with to enter the Glebe Tramsheds – “I feel like I'm having a mid-life crisis”. But it was fun!
*Having worked for NPWS I know that barriers and “no jumping” signs are there to prevent liability in legal action, not necessarily because they have the power of the law to tell people they can’t jump off rocks. Apparently the rangers come down here and turn a blind eye, and my seasoned friend tells me that in summer it’s like 'Piccadilly Circus' with everyone lined up waiting to jump. I was a little dubious about this, because the tide was very low (this is a lagoon just in behind the ocean) and I thought the water was barely deep enough for jumping from such a height, but I figured I’d live. (While I do like wild adventures, there are ways of doing them responsibly and I’d never jump off anything without doing a reconnaissance of the water below first. As teenagers we were always jumping, or otherwise falling with style (there was rarely any straight boring old "jumping"), into this spot we called "The Bombing Hole" (my claim to fame is being the only girl who ever jumped from the top of "the bombing tower"), but the one rule was that someone had to go in first and make sure no submerged logs etc had washed in since last time.)
This is Wattamolla Beach/Lagoon down in Royal National Park anyway, and it was a glorious day for it.
