Sunday 12th April
Today was a glorious day. Do you want to know why? Ok, I’ll tell you. It was glorious not because I did a Skydive and it wasn’t glorious because Munster beat the Ospreys, it was glorious because today was the end of Lent! Yay! My struggle is over! Time to eat myself into a coma!
I started the morning by getting up at a ridiculously early hour, checking my bags into storage and then I went to the NZone office. We were given the usual, “If you die it’s not our fault” paperwork, we were weighed in (so you feel really crappy and you want to throw yourself out of a moving plane, or maybe it’s for safety reasons, I’m not too sure) and then we took the minibus to the jump site. We waited around for a while and then we met our Tandem Master (what a cool job title. It sure beats being a “Sales Assistant” or a “Waitress” or a “Nuclear Physicist” – can you be a “Nuclear Physicist” or did I make that up?). My Tandem Master was called Sasha and he was from Yugoslavia – he had done over 18,000 jumps and he was a machine – so I felt super safe! We got our little outfit on and then we went to the smallest plane ever. There were 9 of us, 3 jumpers, 3 camera men and 3 Tandem Masters and then the driver I guess, so 10 people – there were no seats and you were strapped to the front of the Tandem Master, so you half sat on your Tandem Master and half sat on the floor. Great. The camera man did a bit of videoing and then we were at 15,000 feet! I was the last to jump, so Sasha scootched down to the plane door and we sat there while I got the grossest picture taken and then 1,2,3 we were out! Everyone says that Skydiving isn’t as bad as Bungy Jumping because you have no depth perception at 15,000 feet, but I don’t know if that is true. The Skydive didn’t scare me, my heart didn’t race, I didn’t get butterflies, but when you look out of the plane you can see everything below you and you sort of think, “Oh, I’m falling towards that” – once you’re out of the plane you don’t think about that, you just think that it feels really cool to be falling – the wind rushes past so quickly, so that’s a cool sensation and then the parachute comes out. The freefall feels like it lasts for about 10 seconds – apparently it lasts for over a minute, but Sasha and I must be super heavy because it went sooo much quicker! I always thought that when the parachute comes out that you go up, but you don’t, it just feels like you do, but you’re still falling, it’s just at a much slower rate. You also totally forget about the parachute until it comes out –I’m glad I was strapped to Sasha, I would have forgotten to pull the cord if I was on my own! Anyway, you glide down to the ground – at this point my ears were killing me and I couldn’t equalise them because I had the cold – you’re not meant to dive if you have the cold, but I lied, tear tear. Then once you get used to the extreme ear pain, you realise that the harness is digging into your thighs and then you’re on the ground and it’s over! It was nice to look down over Queenstown and the lake, it was a really pretty place to do a skydive and I’m glad I waited – I would have like to have done it in Wanaka, over the Fox Glacier, but the weather is so bad there that you are never guaranteed to jump! But anyway, the jump went well, I landed on my feet, I survived, I still can’t fully hear out of my right ear, but still... the skydive video is super cool!
After the Skydive I went back to the Hostel but because I had to change rooms I had nowhere to go until 2.00pm, so I just went to the Irish room, where all the Irish girls (and boy) were staying. I sat on the floor and ate a massive bar of chocolate – I bought Turkish Delight and Crunchie Chocolate and 2 litres of milk, so that was nice. The Turkish Delight is runny here, so that was strange but the Crunchie Chocolate was good! Once I was stuffed like a little piggy, Mairead and Mike went to do some washing and I was like, “Aww, I’ll just sit here for a minute” but I ended up falling asleep in the foetal position on the dorm room floor. Apparently they came back and I was still like that! I eventually rolled onto my belly and I lay like that until I heard people moving about in the room, I presumed it was Mairead and Mike, so I was like “Hey guys, looks like I feel asleep”, but it wasn’t them, it was the cleaners, so I left fairly quickly! I then checked into a new room and feel asleep in my new bed! Sleeping is so nice :)
Once I woke up it was pretty late so I just got a Fergburger – tonight it was a Cockadoodle Oink – “Butterflied and crumbled chicken breast, American streaky bacon, avocado, lettuce, red onion, aioli and tomato relish”. Today I gave the red onion and the avocado a miss, but the rest of the burger was a beauty, maybe my favourite Ferg, yum yum yumaroo! After the big bad Ferg I went down to the bar with Mairead and Pete to watch the Munster vs the Ospreys Rugby match – if you watched it then you will know that Munster won, if you didn’t watch it then now you know that Munster won and if you recorded it to watch at a later date then I have ruined it for you. Sorry. I was really sleepy but it was a really good night, we just sat on the sofa in the Altitude Bar watching Rugby – they actually kept the bar open late for us so we could watch the end of the match, which was really quite nice of them :) I like nice people. Nice people are the way forward. Be a nice person. “Be the change you want to see in the world”. Or not. I can’t tell you what to do and neither can Ghandi.
Xx
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