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When we got to the church, the midges were awful. Everyone
(except Bruce) put on loads of insect repellent, but it turned
out not to be necessary for there was a good breeze all morning.
We had six explorers, all boys again, what's up with the girls?:
Adrian, Alexander, Benjamin, John Donaldson Peter William
and Thomas with Ann, Craig and Pamela and the expedition dog,
Bruce.
This was the fourth attempt to reach the big waterfall and
some of us expected more trouble than we got: first there
was a long boring walk along the track to the Gorten Power
Station, then we climbed up the old track following the pipeline,
spotting some of the old railway track on the way. We reached
the dam and had a look at the rain gauge, which is clearly
only read once in a while.
Then we set off across the hill towards the waterfall, close
to the cliff; we found an enormous perched boulder which all
of the explorers managed to scramble on top of. It was sunny
and would have been a great photograph if only I hadn't left
the camera in the car! From the boulder it was only a short
distance to the falls, but the climb up over the mass of wet
rocks was very tricky. We stayed for a time at the fall, eating
wafers and drinking the pure water.
We decided to come back by the direct route over the hill
and it was quite exhausting getting across the first valley.
When we regained the high ground we were able to examine an
extensive area of cultivated ground with several buildings
and shelters. There were some sheets of corrugated iron nearby
and turning them over revealed a slow worm, a toad and a lot
of ants.
After this we just had to go down the hill to get to the river
and the cars, the explorers crossed the river and some of
them had time to collect a few dried crabs before they reached
the car park.
John
Dye
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