Just been sky diving – WOW!! What an awesome experience! 🙂 It was absolutely fantastic, I was pretty nervous on the 25 minute flight up to 9000ft but surprisingly chilled out when my legs were dangling over the side of the plane getting ready to plummet towards the Earth. It was an amazing rush during the 30 second freefall and the views of the surrounding mountainous scenery from up there was just spectacular. Then the parachute opened and we glided gently to earth for about 5 minutes watching the dots on the ground slowly turn into recognisable objects and taking in the fabulous scenery all around, I even got to control the parachute for a bit which was cool.
I must give a big shout out to the sky diving company that I went with as they’ve only been going a month and are a small scale operation with a much more personal service than the other large ‘conveyor belt’ operators in the area. All the guys there were dead friendly and made the whole experience incredibly enjoyable. If you’re thinking of going skydiving in Queenstown then be sure to book with Big Daddy. If you’re just thinking of going sky diving anywhere then just go ahead and do it – it’s a proper good rush!
As Viv has already mentioned I would like to thank my Ufi colleagues for the leaving present of that amazing adrenaline rush – cheers Ufiites!
Other than that I would like to second Viv on the sandflies – they are little bastards and extremely persistent bastards at that. Their name is also misleading – they don’t limit themselves to sand, you find them in forests, by rivers, on roads, in towns, halfway up mountains. Pretty much everywhere on the south island it seems.
And lastly thanks to George and Paul for the blog links!
Right, that’s all for now. Pip pip!
J-Hob
P.S. There’s about 100 new photos up on both our flickr sites – check them out!
Comments
3 responses to “Sky diving!”
Yeah, bleeding sandflies. One of the little gits managed to bite me while i was white water rafting!
I think you need to start up a running tally on the website.
John n Viv – 3, Sandflies – 18 etc.
Admittedly you should be proud to be bitten by a sandfly adventurous enough to try white-water rafting. The new generation of sandfly seems somewhat sluggardly. Won’t move away from the cozy TV and living room. Your sandfly was willing to try something new…. in this case, yummy brit flesh. Congratulations on contributing to the cultural enlightenment of Kiwi sandflies!
Glad you are having a great time, the sky-diving sounds amazing. Worried about that whole dangling from a metal post off a mountain thing! Do you mean over the edge dangling or just ‘would’ve tumbled even further down’ dangling? Neither of which would lead to a particularly fun ending!
You know, some workplaces drive people to jump out of high buildings… yours just had to go one step further and drive you to jump out’ve a plane!
Ha ha! Good point.
I was only dangling over a foot or so drop, but it was steep so if i’d not have grabbed hold of it i’d have skidded further down a scree slope on my bare legs. Ouch! Anyway, all’s well that ends well!