Woke up early around 7 with Tom and Simon to get ready for canyoning. We had a quick lunch of noodle soup before hopping onto a small minibus and heading for the canyons. We stopped on the way to pick up some more people and made it to the canyons in about 15mins. It was quickly apparent that our tour guides were funny blokes, all Vietnamese but very entertaining with their broken English. We disembarked and were quickly assigned harnesses, life jackets and helmets. I brought my gopro along and was using an old shoe lace to tie it around my wrist. We headed down into a deep gorge, practicing a quick bit of abseiling on the way. We got down to the start of the river canyon and started with a 15m abseil. It was pretty simple stuff and we quickly moved on to some water sliding. We slid down various shoots, both head first and feet first, into big pools of water. We did a bit of trekking and swimming between locations with more water slides before coming to the first major obstacle. This obstacle was a 25m waterfall descent which was a lot of fun. We just caught sight of a previous group finishing the abseil and the last guy back flipped off the end section. So of course me and Tom both had a new challenge to do during this descent. We abseiled down this waterfall and both flipped off the last 4-5m of the cliff face into a deep pool. Easy as you like. The next part was jumping from a height into deep pools (like the book lagoon). There were various heights to jump off, from 11m down to 5m. We both jumped off the 11m, I went for a conventional air whilst Mr Chadwick decided on the front flip approach (which resulted in a rather sore face). We both had the chance to climb back up to the 7m jump, which we both backflipped off. Went surprisingly well, landed feet first with the only slight pain being my life jacket digging into my armpits. After the jumps we had a bit of a walk to the last feature which was 'the washing machine'. This was where you abseiled into a whirling pool of water and were shot out the other end. It was quite fun to do but not so good as the water fall. Overall a seriously good day, but came back rather soggy and dirty. I swallowed far more water than I care to think about, especially once you've seen the browny/red state of it. We got back to the hostel and washed and cleaned best we could. We latter went out to the night market for dinner, trying a lot of street food (which we may live to regret). We wondered around and found great joy in haggling for completely random and unwanted things. We somehow managed to get chatting to some locals that spoke basically no English and sat down with them for about 10 minutes sharing in their food and (questionable) vodka. We worked our way through the market and bought some crappy t-shirts for about £0.70 made our way home. Had a really good crack today and felt again like we had made the most of it. We're heading to Nha Trang tomorrow on the bus at about 1 with Simon to stay the night before heading towards Hoi An.

(GoPro footage of canyoning to emerge at some point)