#2: go ziplining in Canada

Christ that’s a heavy title for a jokey blog about the perils of ziplining, but as I am trying to find a name for the various ‘reasons’ why I haven’t done something previously from my bucket list, that’s the closest phobia I can find to describe what I’m on about below. Thanatophobia is the fear of death, I’ve added auto to the front to suggest a degree of autonomy in the process.

I almost went with acrophobia – the fear of heights – but it doesn’t really apply here, given I can merrily stand atop a skyscraper and gaze out over the land like I’m the Eye of Sauron but in Next pastel trousers. So it’s not the heights that bother me with ziplining, it’s my own mischievous mind. Allow me to explain. Not a reader? There’s a wonderful video of us at the end of the article, if you can’t be arsed with all the words.

One thing I do experience more and more is a dull ache in my back whenever I’m near the edge of something I could possibly fall from. Admittedly, it’s probably the pressure from Paul’s hand imperceptibly pushing me towards oblivion – he knows where my life insurance policy is kept and has an eye on a new car – but it feels more like my body trying to protect me from calamity. You may have heard of ‘the call of the void’ or as the French put it, l’appel du vide, which sounds far nicer. Everything sounds better in French, less so a German translation, which I assume contains four hundred syllables and sounds like a Alsation barking furiously through a letterbox at the postman. L’appel du vide is the human instinct to do something that acts against our own self-preservation: that niggling little voice that tells you to step off a cliff-edge, to yank wildly at the emergency exit door handle on a plane at 37,000ft, to reach over and pluck a hair from a mole growing on someone’s chinny-chin-chin.

I have it all the time when I’m driving, idly wondering what would happen if I pressed the button for my handbrake at 70mph, steered the car off the side of a bridge or my own personal, recurring ponderance: the temptation to lower the driver side window just a shade and smartly post my mobile out into the road. Such acts would be irresponsible at best and lethal at worst and so we must of course pay them no mind, but still the thoughts linger: what would it feel like in those fleeting moments as we hurtled to our death, or fibbed our way through an insurance claim for a new phone? Edgar Allen Poe penned a short story based on exactly these thoughts called ‘The Imp Of The Perverse’ – a title I’m fairly sure I’ve seen on an ‘alternate’ video website somewhere – and he describes it far more eloquently:

‘We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss—we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink away from the danger. Unaccountably we remain… it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height… for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it.’

Edgar allen poe

Yeah, wot ‘e said. I mention l’appel du vide here as it is pertinent to the zipline experience: as I said earlier, it’s not the height I worry about, but the temptation to unclip myself as I hurtle downwards. I knew this would be an issue because if you were with us five years ago, you’d have found Paul and I standing on top of the Stratosphere in Las Vegas, 110 storeys up, about to hurl ourselves over the side in a ‘controlled bungee descent’. We had spotted an advert for the jump as we caroused around the casinos and buoyed up by the confidence that too many Long Island Iced Teas gives you, signed up to jump the next morning. Funny, isn’t it, the things that sound like a good time when soused in alcohol – it certainly didn’t feel as thrilling and exciting standing there stone-cold-sober and trying to hitch back a hangover. 110 storeys is high: not quite as tall as the Shard in London, though still high enough for the very real risk of a Shart in Las Vegas.

We were harnessed up by a bloke who went at it with all the interest of someone untangling a box of Christmas lights and were then led out onto a platform where, amongst other vitally important things which we immediately forgot, we were told in no uncertain terms that we mustn’t touch the clip that attached us to the cord. You know, because it was the one thing stopping us turning to jam on the pavement. Immediately then, me:

I had to really battle the urge not to tinker with it and listen, I was in no way suicidal: I’d left half a Reuben sandwich back in the mini-fridge at the hotel and there was no way I was dying before finishing that. But the urge was so unbelievably strong that it became frightening. So to give myself no chance to cause an injury we jumped without much delay: me plummeting to Earth in one long ribbon of invective, Paul choosing to go with the traditional scream. It was absolutely brilliant, although it took a good two hours of solid gambling afterwards before my hands stopped trembling.

Later on the same holiday we joined up with a random shag who had flown in from Calgary to walk around the outside of the CN Tower in Toronto. We were possibly the only ones on the edge who looked entirely non-plussed about the whole experience (amazing though it was) because once you’ve leapt off such a building, walking primly around the edge of another seems like a walk in a very high park. Not the case for our visiting paramour though: he was so scared he kept peeping out the most unbelievably rotten farts, which I have to think added an extra layer of terror for the rest of our group. Good times.

Anyway, enough nostalgia: last week saw Paul and I returning to my favourite place in the entire world: Canada. Three times we have been now and each one of those trips ended with me sitting tittylipped in the airport coming home because I didn’t want to leave. Don’t get me wrong: there’s a lot to love the UK for – my friends, mates, family, Air Crash Investigation on Disney+, Goomba. But as the UK turns more and more toxic, Canada becomes a literal breath of fresh air. I’ve tried to replicate the air by mixing maple syrup into my vape but all that gave me was holiday-homesickness and a cough.

We had headed to Vancouver for a week, picking Van (that’s what the locals call it) (according to the three-second google search I just did, which is probably horrendously inaccurate) simply because I wanted to get the most use out of a British Airways companion voucher and 150,000 air-miles that we had built up over the years. I had spotted that British Airways had launched their new business class product on routes to Vancouver and because I really, really wanted to try it, that’s why we went to Vancouver. All in, it only cost us about £700 return for both of us to fly from Newcastle through Heathrow to Vancouver and back in business. Bargain. Plus, and this sounds so greedy, Paul and I had enjoyed the most amazing nachos in a pub in Gastown, a district in downtown Vancouver, five years previous and we were desperate to have them again.

No, hear me out. Nachos are my favourite food as long as they’re done right. I’m yet to experience good nachos in the UK, where most places seem to think microwaving a bag of Doritos and then sprinkling some plastic cheese on top together with four teaspoons of those crappy dips you get from the supermarket. That’s not nachos, that’s whoreish crisps. These Vancouver nachos were layered and delicious and covered in so much crunchy cheese it was like picking at a gloriously scabby knee. I’m pleased to report that both the pub and their nachos dish were very much still trading, and I present it below for your appraisal.

Perfect right? Vancouver itself is a glorious city and I’ll probably spin a blog entry out about that at some point so I’ll keep the detail brief here, he says, 2700 words in. We played golf on a very fancy pitch-n-putt, we went for a horse-drawn carriage ride around Stanley Park, we took a brief but terrifying ride in a seaplane around Vancouver Harbour, a seaplane which had just enough room for the pilot, a random bloke and his wife and then Paul and I sat at the back. I resisted the urge to ask when someone was coming around with the meal-service, acutely aware that I was one harsh bank of the plane away from tumbling out of the door at 15,000ft. The flight did give me a bit of inspiration for another item on my bucket list though, which was handy.

One very quick observation about Vancouver though: take a moment to vape within 12 foot of any building and you’ll get the full ire of Canada thrown at you (namely a light tut, then a heartfelt apology for going too far and a promise to do better), but apparently feel free to smoke crystal meth wherever you fancy. I’ve never seen such naked and obvious drug abuse: it was extremely eye-opening. But that’s meth for you.

Returning back to the ziplining then: I had ‘Zipline – Wales’ on my bucket list with an eye to doing the super-long zipline over Penrhyn Quarry in Wales, and I may still do that at some point, but we had spotted a day-trip to Whistler available on GetYourGuide including ziplining between the mountains and before I could say ‘check our insurance first’ Paul had it booked for the very next day. We rose early, bought a coffee strong enough to reboot a dying sun, and made our way to the bus station to board our bus to Whistler. It was tipping down – we’d have been drier had we swam to the bus-stop along the harbour – but the zipline promised to operate in all weathers so we couldn’t duck out. We arrived at the bus-stop with plenty of time to relax and wait for the bus to open up. Well, almost.

Paul and I always seem to attract an irritant on our travels and sure enough, one such burden made herself known quite quickly as we waited to board. Perhaps it was my magnificent beard or the faint smell of maple syrup that accompanies Paul everywhere but she clearly thought we were experts in all things Canadian and would not desist from asking us questions. “Is this the bus to Whistler?’ was her opening gambit, asked as we stood in front of the bus with “Whistler Tours – from Vancouver to Whistler” emblazoned on the front. When I reassured her that we weren’t standing there for the good of our health and it was a safe bet that the Bus to Whistler would indeed deliver us to Whistler, she met my agreement with suspicious eyes and went to repeat the question to someone else as though I was playing an elaborate prank.

You would hope that would be the end of our brief entanglement but she wandered over thrice more – first to ask if there was Wifi on the bus (I pointed to the ‘Wifi onboard’ sticker with a cheery grin), then again to enquire as to how long the journey would take. This time I waved my arm expansively like I was Vanna White on the Wheel of Fortune, pointing out the entire side of the bus which proclaimed in breezy lettering that the drive was ‘two hours of stunning views along the Sea to Sky Highway’, though my smile had faded a little. She saved the best for last: ‘can you tell me what the weather is like up in Whistler’ – I replied ‘tropical’ and that perhaps she was, if anything, ‘a touch over-dressed’. I’m not sure my attempt at humour landed because she then spent most of the journey plucking fitfully at her parka and taking pained looks out of the coach window as though the incredibly heavy downpour would pass at any moment and she would be left roasting in the notorious October heatwaves that the snowcapped mountains of British Columbia have become known for. We nicknamed her Bungalow (nothing going on upstairs) and hoped she wouldn’t be joining us on the zipline. Happily, she didn’t. We made our way up to the check-in.

Ziplining comes with very strict weight allowances, although perhaps not for the reason you might think. I had assumed that the maximum weight limit was a cut-off where, if any heavier, there would be a real and present risk of the rope snapping, sending you plummeting to the forest floor below like a bucket of meat dropped from a plane. That isn’t true, unless you weigh the same as those wanker-tanker cars you often see parked across four bays in the ASDA car-park. The maximum weight limit is simply due to the fact that the heavier the rider, the more speed you’ll pick up and greater is the risk of clattering into the landing point and shooting backwards into the middle of the course. Similarly, if you’re too light, there’s the risk of stopping in the middle as you didn’t pick up enough speed. I asked our instructors what would happen if such a calamity occurred and they cheerily replied they’d zip themselves back along the line and tow you back, like the AA picking up a stranded Transit.

The posted maximum weight limit for this zipline was 275lb, and I knew from weighing myself before I came away on holiday that I was sitting at 257lb. But see, that’s the ‘optimum’ weighing result, i.e. after I’ve taken off all my clothes, had my morning poo, a shave, a wee and before breakfast. Here we were ten days later after many, many examples of eating far too much and drinking too much beer, plus I as wearing a heavy pleather coat and baggy jeans. They weigh you before you get your harness – very discreetly, they don’t have a bloke with a big moustache guessing your weight like you’re at the funfair. I worked myself up into a right tizz internally that I would get to the venue and find I couldn’t do it because I was too heavy but I needn’t have bothered myself: turns out I had 10lb to play with. I knew I should have got myself some travelling poutine for the journey.

Let’s consider that feeling for a little bit, actually. It’s been a good few years since I was at my biggest weight and yet, even now, I get low-key anxious so often about whether or not I’ll ‘fit’ into so many situations. It’s actually only ever happened to me once – I got stuck getting into Dudley Do-Right’s log-flume in Universal Islands of Adventure, although that was actually down to my long gazelle-like legs rather than my bulk. But the absolute shame of struggling to get out (panicking making everything so much worse) whilst everyone in the queue either tittered into their hand or gave me a ‘well god bless you for trying, have a doughnut’ pitying expression has stuck with me. Even if the ride has one of those test-seats outside (which fuck knows why they insist on putting them at the front of the queue in full view of everyone else boarding, as though you’re not already ashamed enough) I can’t relax until I’m actually buckled into the ride itself. It follows me everywhere: will they have a wetsuit that fits when I went paddleboarding, will I need an extension for the seatbelt on the plane, am I going to be able to sit in that office chair without most of my arse piling out the back like badly-proven dough.

It gets exhausting but my husband – an absolute study of patience and kindness – always calms me down and points to all the other times I’ve worried for no good reason. As we walked up to the zipline office to get signed in and weighed for our harness I mentioned that I wouldn’t want to cause him the disappointment of not being able to do it if I was too heavy and that, if that was the case, I’d want him to do it anyway without me and I’d busy myself in the chocolate shops. He very sweetly reassured me that if I was too heavy it didn’t matter, we’d find something else to do, and to stop fretting about letting him down. My anxiety melted away like mist on a summer morning as a result. He’s a sweetheart and I remain very thankful for the fact I haven’t exhausted his fortitude yet. That said, it was probably more his fear of missing out on any possible chocolate shop visits that fuelled his kindness but we’ll take what we can after sixteen years.

We had half an hour or so before we had to board the minibus so we decided to take the opportunity to buy a cheap coat for me to replace the H&M pleatherette little number I had, which was doing about as good a job keeping out the water as wearing a colander on my head would have done. However, we had forgotten that Whistler is very much the domain of people who probably don’t need to use airmiles to travel business class. Paul picked up a coat which he thought would be suitable for me and it was only when we got to the checkout and the very polite lady asked for $1,400 Canadian dollars that we realised our mistake.

Once Paul had restarted my heart we told her we’d be back later as we ‘didn’t fancy carrying it round all day’, she gave a haughty little chuckle and we left. We nipped next door to the gift-shop and bought two stunningly unattractive ‘Mac in a Sac’ numbers – one in corpse-lip blue, the other in Premier Inn purple. They weren’t cheap either – $120 Canadian dollars for the pair – but at least we wouldn’t go missing on the hike, given we were dressed like Pat Sharp leading an orienteering weekend. They did do a remarkable job keeping us dry, though presumably that was due to the static forcefield created by all the rustling.

We met with our two instructors and another English couple and boarded the bus to take us to the first zipline. Our instructors were lovely: two English students from Leeds and Southend-on-Sea respectively. We were the Brexit bus. There was lots of small-talk, mostly initiated by me as I was trying to mask my nerves with useless gabbling. I asked about local bears in the area (my apps weren’t working, blame the mobile reception) and what to do if one approached. Huddle together and hope for the best wasn’t the answer I was hoping for, admittedly, but how we laughed as I asked if I could shoo it away with a cloud of Menthol Mojito.

The minibus trundled up the side of the mountain for a worryingly long time, given us plenty of time to consider exactly how high up these ziplines were. Again, not scared of heights, but I do like to be able to see where I’ve parked. Once we arrived at the first…base (?) we were given a brief safety talk where the instructors answered all my questions, plus one from the other couple once they managed to get a word in edgeways. The first zipline was designed so you could zip parallel to one another and race. We invited the other couple to go first: I think she took it as us being wonderfully gentlemanly and gallant and I wish I could say that was the case, but no – I had taken a view that if there was anything fundamentally wrong with the safety equipment, sooner they plummeted to their death than Paul and myself.

But we needn’t have worried, it was all perfectly safe. When it came to our turn we were strapped in, told to wait a moment or two, then set ourselves off. They had given us a GoPro to record footage, as you’ll see below. There is a moment of absolute terror when you step off from the platform, but once you know the harness has taken your weight and you’re safe, absolute exhilaration kicks in. I absolutely fucking loved it, if you’ll forgive my Canadian French. They weren’t kidding about the fact that larger folks go far quicker – you can see from the video below the difference in our speeds. I’ve also included two excerpts from our individual lines so you can see the difference between my husband and I: I’m not the calm, measured soul that this anxiety-riddled blog may suggest. I know, I’m shocked too. Apologies for the raindrop distorting the lens and giving Paul a terrifying face not unlike Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

The rest of the two hours experience was filled with walking between the lines, chatting about the forest and shouting ‘HOPE YOU DON’T DIE BABE’ as Paul hurtled into the unknown. It was genuinely brilliant and I thoroughly encourage anyone thinking about it to give it a go. Zipping through the air, even in the pouring rain, is a majestic feeling. Even though you’re only suspended by a cable it feels exceptionally safe, not least because we had two wonderful instructors with us who went to great lengths to talk us through everything. For the record, there’s been 16 deaths in ten years in the US through ziplining, so the odds are pretty damn good – 230 people were killed by lightning in the same period. Bad news for you astraphobic folk. I’m just showing off now.

We finished our day in Whistler with the joining of cheese and meat in the form of a fondue: I maintain that any day that ends in melted cheese is a winner, and this particular fondue really hit the spot. I’m not sure if it was the post zipline adrenaline comedown or the fact I was getting lightheaded from the paraffin fumes from the patio heater, but it was delicious. Paul and I were lucky enough a few years ago to have fondue in a picturesque little Swiss restaurant outside of Bern called the Rosengarten and I think it speaks to our carefully curated obesities that when we talk of happy holiday memories, this always comes up. The fact that the fondue came in a caquelon big enough for Paul to take a bath is merely coincidental, I’m sure. The Whistler fondue wasn’t quite on that transcendental level but it was glorious enough to keep us happy, and we waddled back to our bus with full bellies.

If anything, the bus ride back to Vancouver was more terrifying than the zipline: what had seemed like a pleasant and safe road in the daytime turned far more terrifying in the inky black of night, winding our way along roads which had a drop to the right and a cliff to the left. It didn’t help that our bus driver looked as though he was nodding off at the wheel – every now and then he would pitch himself upright as though shocked by a hidden current in his chair and lurch the bus around a corner at great speed, as though surprised by the road turning against him. I decided to leave my destiny in his hands, shut my eyes, and went to sleep.

Oh! In case you’re wondering, we weren’t joined for the return home by Bungalow: we can only assume she was mauled to death by a bear who she had approached to ask for directions to that big mountain thingy.

Just like that, the second bucket-list can be ticked off.

List progress: 2/39

17 October 2023