Leap of Faith

When we last left our intrepid heroine, she was sitting looking out at the rain. (Sometimes Eithne refers to herself in the third person.) The rain eventually stopped, and after Robbie had pulled up at least 100 non-indigenous pine trees that were despoiling the landscape, we headed to the Gairezi River and ADVENTURE.

The road to and from Gairezi is worthy of a whole post in its own right and, indeed, you will be getting one, but I decided to skip on a bit to the story of what happened when we got to the river.

Robbie remembered a Jumping Rock from his youth whence he used to hurl himself into the river. After scouring the bush for a bit, he concluded that he had found the Jumping Rock in question. It was sufficiently high that I assumed he wasn’t planning to repeat the exploits of his younger days. I was wrong. I waited below (Robbie kindly told me where the car keys were, just in case), camera at the ready.

First Robbie’s head poked out of the trees.

Then he leaped …

Down,

And down,

And splash!

I’m glad to report that he reappeared, so I didn’t need to go back to Harare and tell Scot and Toni that I had lost their son in the Gairezi.

Of course, when Robbie did reappear, he was full of the joys of leaping from the Jumping Rock. ‘It’s awfully liberating, Sue,’ he declared. (Robbie calls me Sue – it’s a long story.) ‘I think you should do it.’

Lord love a duck. I’m really bad at saying no when someone tells me I should do something. Which is why I found myself clambering up the slope, hanging on to the scrub and peering over the edge. There were a few false starts and I very seriously considered turning round but … well, this whole year is about taking leaps of faith. How could I not do this?

So...

And

And

And

And

And, having inhaled quite a lot of river but with my contact lenses mercifully still in place,

I did it twice.