Going Ape

7 July 2010

A few weeks ago we headed to Bedgebury Forest for the first part of bride-to-be Helen’s hen do. The second part was to be a meal at a Mexican restaurant, but first Helen wanted to make her friends work. At Bedgebury is Go Ape – a series of five courses with rope ladders, bridges, ziplines and cargo nets all to be traversed way up high in the trees. I was unfortunately far too small to get kitted out with a harness and get up in the trees, but went along to laugh at the others and take photos of their combination of trepidation and glory through the day. The trepidation began as soon as the training session started, as this brilliant collection of expressions shows.

Once educated on how to attach one’s harness and pulley to the lines there was a low wire walkway to get across followed by a short zipline. A little warmup for what we could discern through the trees of further along the course, with people flying through the air on ropes – and one guy in particular shrieking like a girl every time he did so.

I hope this kid got to take his branch home.

This is Helen’s sister Katherine coming to a stop at the end of a long zipline. The wood chippings may be up in the air here, but if you landed backwards rather than coming in forwards on your feet, they soon made themselves at home in your pants. Or so I hear.

It was quite a workout for my neck, looking up at everybody in the trees. The highest point of the course was at site 2, where the zipline platform was 13m high. I think this may have been the longest crossing of 20.5 metres. Those cargo nets looked like hard work. The ziplines on the other hand looked like so much fun.

Helen, returning to the ground via the longest zipwire on the course – 146 metres long. This is just a selection of the photos I took that day – if you want to see more swinging through trees, the whole set can be seen at Flickr.

Posted in: celebrate, friends, photos

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One Response to “Going Ape”

Jersey: Saunas and tortilla chips : dreamdust
18th March 2011 @ 11:00 am

[...] where the wedding was to be held, we saw a group of Helen’s friends whom we knew from the hen do. They were teetering along the country lane in their high heels, their hotel being the one [...]