30 Days has September: DAY 25: NO SUCH THING AS BOLD & OLD CLIMBERS

Feeling pretty shady from a few too many 'silent' wines, a 4.30am alarm for the two hour trip to the Blue Mountains was about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit.

But, being a rock hard Northerner, I managed to battle through it and get my arse to Katoomba for a day of throwing ourselves off cliffs and jumping into ice cold water.

Katoomba, (see map) the biggest town in the area, is known as 'the capital of the Blue Mountains' . The Aboriginal meaning of Katoomba is ' Shiny Falling Waters' and there are many waterfalls in the area.

An egg and bacon roll and a wetsuit fitting later, we were ready for a morning of abseiling practise before the adventure of doom into the canyon in the afternoon. I've actually done abseiling once before when I was about 11 years old (the new experience part today is canyoning - i.e. jump, swim and wade your way through a canyon, finishing with a 30 metre abseil down a pumping waterfall, which I've definitely never done!). With the rosy filter of youthful fearlessness last time, I had forgotten quite how terrifying it is.

Bru on a practise run - 5, 10 and 30 metre cliff abseiling

I'm not going to lie- I was bricking it here

I found the abseiling very challenging (!) and while the others were jumping down the rope doing '360' turns on the way down, I was shaking like an Ikea wardrobe. One of our guides, Nathan, tried to make me feel better about this, saying that fear was good as it keeps you safe.

Our other guide Paul had a great saying; 'There are old climbers and bold climbers, but there are no old, bold climbers'. (As in they are all dead!)

We were the first canyoning group that the guys from http://www.rdmh.com.au/ had taken out this season, probably due to the fact the water was about 4 degrees. Which is probably the temperature of Scarborough's water in summer, and so I remembered my roots and got a grip and got stuck in.