Bungeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Location: Queenstown
Weather: Cloudy but not cold

OK suckers, at the moment I'm in Queenstown - the world's centre of adrenaline rushes - it's the place where they have the original and oldest bungee jump over the Kawarau Suspension Bridge. This morning I decided to have a go. It's 43m's high and the one where they can dip your head into the river, you are picked up by a boat at the end. To be honest I didn't like it much. I was quite tired, NO, I did not actually have a hangover (even though I had a few pints last night) and the weather was almost raining, it was also only a 1 second free fall and over quite quickly. I also rebounded about 5 times on the bungee rope, which meant I span round and round quite a lot which I'm not a fan of. Anyways afterwards I thought this was not enough for me and my heroes from Jackass would not stand for such a thing, so I elected to move to the next level - the highest possible bungee jump in New Zealand - THE NEVIS - done from a cable car 134m's between two mountains. Logically I should not have been too bothered about this, because that base jump from the SkyTower in Auckland was higher (192m's) and I was reasonably calm on that one, but for some unexplaninable reason I found the whole Nevis thing terrifying and I seriously don't know why, my legs were actually shaking before I went to jump, I thought I was going to chuck up at one point. I can only guess it was the nice holes and glass they have in the floor of the cable car, the mountain settings, the sheerness of the fall... perhaps it was when the bloke said "bungee change" and he changed the rope for my jump so I was the guinea pig or just my human survival instinct kicking, I really dunno.
To make things worse you walk a narrow gangplank before they take your photo! I then jumped off into the openness, then a freefall for 8 seconds! you hear the wind whistling past your ears, the ground rushing towards you and just as you think you're going to hit the rocks the bungee kicks in and you bounce back up again. After a couple of rebounds you pull a cord on your left leg which unties the bungee, flipping you upright and you get hoisted back to the cable car as if you're being rescued by helicopter. I can honestly say this was truly BAD! AWESOME! MENTAL! INSANE! CRAZY! WICKED! FANTASTIC! etc etc etc Talk about wake up call! It's the best adrenaline buzz I've done, way better than sky-diving and a billion times better than the bridge bungee, only the sky-tower comes near. I supose it was the kind of hit I was looking for, hey I'm still pretty high writing this.
I even got interviewed afterwards by some woman doing a Phd on adventure tourism!

By JamesReed on 01.05.04 @ 05:29 AM GMT