ZN: Skydiving!!

Thursday 19.4: I had always considered activities such as skydiving and bengi jumping as waste of money, because you´re paying enourmous sums for an experience lasting only for a few minutes. But as Carla began to plan her skydiving on Tuesday evening I began to feel temted to do it, too. I had heard from many people that New Zealand is one of the best places in the world to go skydiving, mostly because of the beautiful views. So I ended up signing up for skydiving in Wanaka for Thursday at 11am :) We slept in (till 8am) and since Denise had alrady gone skydiving in the US she decided to go hiking instead. In the morning Carla and I walked around Wanaka, which is another nice little town surrounded my mountains. We did a little bit shopping. New Zealand has definately cheaper prices for clothes and food than Australia! Soon it was time to drive to the airport for our adventure...

In Wanaka

The weather was perfect for skydiving! The sky was clear, the sun was shining and there was hardly any wind. First we were shown a short instruction video that emphasized on remembering to smile to the cameras and advertised their overpriced photographing offerings. I decided not to take any of them. Carla had an extra person jumping with her and filming the jump, and her DVD is cool to watch! We had to sign some forms about being aware of the danger of getting injured or being killed if something goes wrong. I tried not to pay too much attention to those texts. Since we had decided to jump from the highest altitude - 4575m - we were also informed about the possibility of starting hyperventilating in such high altitude. We needn´t wait long before we were given our suits, hats and gloves. We were introduced to our tandem jumpers - mine was this cool guy from the States - who helped us to get into our harnesses. Then we were taken to a small plane, where we had four jumpers with their tandems sitting tightly on the floor. This all happened so quicky I hadn´t time to get nervous. The flight up to 15 000ft took around 15-20min and we saw some beautiful views over Mount Cook, the longest river of New Zealand (forgot its name) etc. Our tandem jumpers told us about the scenery. I thought I would´ve been nervous on the plane, but I was just mostly excited. I was told some instructions for the jump, and especially reminded to look at the horizon instead of down for some better views of the surrounding mountains. Then I was told we´d jump in one minute, which felt like a long one! Finally Carla and her tandem jumped, and as I saw them flying off the plane I really realized I was just about to do the same! Before jumping we sat for a while on the edge of the door and smiled to a camera attached to the plane wing. The jump was amazing :D During the first seconds we span around in the air and dropped really fast, followed by a 60sec freefall. The moment I jumped I changed my mind about it and was really glad I had decided to do it. The freefall was really extreme and exciting, followed by relaxed flying after the parasuit opened. We were floating in the air, enjoying the landscape, and he let me pull the parasuit handels to turn and go up and down. I felt like wanting to stay up there for a longest time, but of course we had to land, sitting on the ground. Carla had landed just before me and we got in together and took some pictures of us in our suits. Then we sat outside for a while talking to this UK guy and waiting for Carla´s DVD to get ready.

Our plane

Happy after my skydive

We met Denise back at our hostel, and drove to Queenstown. After checking in to a nice hostel we walked around the town centre, which was bigger and had more shops than the other towns (exluding Christchurch that is the biggest town in the South Island). I liked Queenstown. We had lunch at a cafe where you could also use the internet for free. After walking back to the hostel I decided to go to use their spa, which was outside. It was nice sitting there alone in the warm water, surrounded by darkness and shadows of the surrounding mountains. It was a good and relaxing moment for me after the excitement of skydiving :)