Skydiving

According to Ryan you have to do something daring on a round the world trip, and as the thought of doing a bungee jump scares me silly, I sort of agreed that skydiving might be ok. Unfortunately, on Friday we found ourselves in the 'skydiving capital of the world': Lake Taupo, and my half-hearted former agreement ended up becoming a reality.

We booked our jump just before lunch, and after checking the weather was still ok to jump, we headed to the airport around 2:30pm. On arriving at the airport we were shown around the hanger, the plane and had our harness' fitted. Our tandems then came to say hello, checking our harnesses, and making various jokes about how it they looked a bit loose, a bit ropey etc! We were then loaded onto the plane, sitting faces backwards in front of our tandem in the tiniest plane I've ever seen! Once we were airborne our tandem joined us to them and explained what we needed to do once we had exited (jumped) out of the plane.

Once we had reached 12,000 ft the shutter in one side of the plane was raised, and the first person (who happened to be Ryan!) and his tandem prepared to jump out of the plane. As you're attached to the person who knows what to do, you, as the novice, are almost completely out of the plane before your tandem decides to leave the plane. As Ryan went first, this also meant I had to sit and watch him jump. Surprisingly, I wasn't too scared until that point, and then suddenly seeing Ryan disappear made it all very real. Luckily (I suppose) I was next, and there was hardly anytime in between Ryan jumping and me being in the doorway to jump, so there was no time to panic. Before I knew it my tandem had pushed my head against his shoulder and we were falling. Falling was definitely the scariest part, as you feel completely out of control, and you suddenly see the earth below you, and you become incredibly aware that you are falling from the sky at 200km/h.

Luckily, after around 3 seconds later you reached terminal velocity, and you just feel air rushing towards you, which was actually really amazing. After around 40 seconds our tandems pulled the parachute, and everything got really peaceful and you could appreciate the amazing views of the lake and mountains below. After Ryan's parachute had opened his tandem told him to look up to see the tiny speck falling that was me and my tandem. We were then suddenly side-by-side as our tandems manoeuvred us so we could say hello, waving madly at each other with massive grins on our faces. After around 7 minutes of gliding along, and a couple of tight corkscrew turns, we were coming in to land, with the ground rushing up to meet us. The smiles on our faces showed how brilliant it was, however we don't think we'll be jumping again in a hurry.