Perils at the Blue Mountains

I went up to the Blue Mountains, which is a wilderness region west of Sydney which has a lot of hiking trails, really quite beautiful. I was surprised about the amount of safety precautions, more so than in the U.S. They had fencing and railings up along most of the miles of trails, definitely all trails next to cliff edges. Yet, I still was able to almost kill myself.

I hiked about 3km to a fairly remote look out on top this cliff, an amazing view. When I noticed a large lizard on a rock right on the path, it was maybe a foot long including the tail. So I wanted to take a photo of him. As I took my camera out of my pocket, the strap snagged and pulled the camera out of my hand. It bounced nicely on the rock and avoided the fence by going underneath it and over the cliff.

I leaned over the fence and looked down and there was a small ledge that it landed on. So I decided to climb over the fence and retrieve it. I wasn’t quite sure if the ledge would hold my weight, so as I climbed down I held on to a small tree, which I knew would not hold my weight if the ledge didn’t. That’s when I began to think, remote region, alone, doing a stupid thing, this is how people get killed, isn’t it. I could just see the headline: “American Unexplainably Killed on World’s Safest Nature Trail”

I lowered myself anyways, grabbed the camera and was off the ledge fast as possible. Everything worked out fine, except my camera was damaged even more. It has been acting up already, stuck in automatic mode, any movie or manual settings don’t work. Now the shutter release button is broke and I need to use a paper clip to take shots.

Hopefully it will last the rest of the trip, it’s only my small digital point and shoot. My film camera has been dropped numerous times and usually only dents the cement. Gotta love old mechanical Nikon FE2s. Otherwise I may need to check if B&H will ship int’l overnight to my hotel.