Sunday, 29 March 2009

• Skydiving New Zealand

  

  I swear, there is something about the air in New Zealand that makes you want to be adventurous. Although, the fact that they offer virtually every adventure activity you could ever hope for all in the same place doesn't hurt either.

  My friends and I were perusing all of the options we had for adventure. Bungie jumping we had already done (you can read about it here), so we were looking for some new and interesting things to do. As we were walking down the streets of Queenstown, we came across an ad for skydiving. We all looked at each other, and we knew that was it. We had to do it.

   

  We ended up staying an hour away from Queenstown in a smaller town called Wanaka. It is nestled right in the mountains, and next to a beautiful lake. Standing on the ground, our surroundings were simply remarkable, so we couldn't begin to imagine what they were like from thousands of feet in the air. One of our friends made the call and signed us up for a dive the next morning.

  That night, we decided to check out some of the local bars.....which turned out to be a pretty terrible idea for the morning......but we couldn't be more excited that night before we went. The next day, we reluctantly got up, put on our warm jackets, and headed out the door.

   

  Once we got to the place where we would be boarding the airplane, there was very little around us. There was a large warehouse-like room where they stored all of their gear and had us watch a short informational video before getting onto our plane. The video outlined the basics of what we would need to know, should our skydive instructor be unable to perform any of the necessary action......like pulling the cord for the parachute! I didn't want to imagine what would happen to make the person I was strapped to from thousands of feet in the air unable to perform any of the necessary actions....but I was not ready to find out!

   

  When we got on the plane, I looked at my friend's face. She had turned ghost white.....looking out the window as we got higher and higher in the air. My other friend couldn't stop nervously smiling....getting ready for his jump out of this perfectly good airplane. It turned out that I would be the first to go though.

   

  We slid up to the door of the plane and my instructor started maneuvering my body out of the door. As my entire body started to hang out of the door of the plane, I started to get some pretty serious butterflies in my stomach. I waved to the camera (as they tell you to do) and got ready for him to tell me what was next. I was suddenly flung out of this plane, staring at a ground that was thousands of feet away. Why would I do this to myself!

   

  The fall was actually pretty surreal feeling. The air flies past your face, forcing your mouth open. I was pretty happy that there was nobody taking any pictures of me from that angle! Once we got to the point where we had to pull the parachute, the fall takes a turn from a feeling of flying to that of being carried through the air. After we pulled the chute, I was able to take out my camera and snap some pictures of my friends who were twirling around in their parachutes next to me.

   

  Once we got close to the ground, we lifted our feet into the air and waited until we were on the ground safely to start freaking out about what we had just done. Each of us came down, snapped off of the hooks attaching us to our instructors, and ran to hug each other and talk about what we had just done. All of us were in agreement that we wanted to go again immediately, but we had to save that for another day.

   

  Have you ever gone skydiving before? What was your experience? If not, would you ever consider going?

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