Skydiving and bungy jumping

This will be the last blog post from New Zealand soil. As I'm writing we only have 8 hours or so left until we board our flight to Tonga, and chance mayhap has put us in the same hostel, in the exact same room, where we also slept our very first night in NZ. This is, however, not a farewell message this magnificent country we've spent the past 10 months in. We'll leave that 'til later once we've had time to reflect on it on the golden beaches of the island kingdom.

This blog post is just to tell you that we skydived (tandem) and bungy jumped (solo) in Taupo last Tuesday (14 July)! We did both extreme activities on the same day since the weather turned quite bad the rest of the week (we had to abandon our plans to go skiing on the volcanoes in the Tongariro national park). Skydiving from 15,ooo feet (that's 4570 metres!) with 60 seconds of freefall was bloody awesome! It's something we feel is worth experiencing once in a lifetime, but it's not something we'd want to do every day.

You're allowed to look a bit funny just before jumping out of an aircraft at 15,000 feet, right?

Bungy jumping is completely different from skydiving, at least in our experience. We jumped over the Waikato River in a beautiful gorge. In some ways bungy jumping is a lot harder than tandem skydiving, since you actually have to launch yourself with your own willpower and lack a 90 kg tandem master who pushes you into the sky. Neither one of us hesitated though as we stood on the edge of the drop. Maybe there was something magic in the voice of the jump master as she called out "One, two, three, bungyyyyyy!", because on the last word we were both compelled to lean forward, and then it was too late for second thoughts.

The location of our bungy jumps. You can see the jump platform up to the right.

Neither one of us got wet, which was just as well since it is winter here and we didn't want to catch a pneumonia. But we did get close enough to the still murky green water to see the reflections of our faces before our fingertips shattered the image into thousands of wavy concentric rings.

Not a bad way to finish our great time in New Zealand!

A few MORE PICTURES of our jumps are available here.