Skydiving in Taupo

So after leaving New Plymouth on Monday afternoon, we drove for about 6 hours up through Taranaki to Taupo, on the NE edge of the mighty Lake Taupo. It is a huge, huge lake. Drove some interesting roads under construction that took us way up on to the tops of the mountains, we were literally driving on the ridges that they had shaped to put this tight, winding road on. I wanted to look at the views, but when you're doing 100 with a semi on your rear on a road with no shoulders and 500 foot drop offs, protected by a barbed-wire fence erected by a farmer generations ago, your attention is pretty much on the road, waiting for one of may hairpin turns ahead. Driving on the highways through the mountains is like a racetrack.

We arrived in Taupo after dark and camped by the lake. In the morning we found a place to clean up and headed out to the airport about noon. We got squared away with what we wanted to do at the skydive centre, and met our dive masters who we going to jump tandem with. My dive master was Michael Holmes, who has an interesting story I'll touch on later.

The plane took off, a somewhat rickety bucket packed full of people. No worries I thought, if we go down, I've got a parachute on, right? We roared up to 12,000 feet, where the first guy went out. I was the first to go at 15,000 feet, so I was right behind him and watched him go out the door. Pretty amazing sight, to watch someone else fall out of an airplane.

Next we climbed up to 15,000 feet, which took a total of about 25 minutes. Enough time to wonder what you are doing up there a few times over. Nonetheless, the door came open and it was my turn to go. The cameraman hops out, and we sit on the edge, and 1,2,3 out the plane we go.

The only real initial sensation of falling is when you drop from the edge, because you o from sitting still to gathering speed, but once you reach the speed you settle in at, the only feeling present is that it's real windy and cold. It is kind of neat to float freely like that though. After about 60 seconds of free fall, Mike pulled the chute and we were floating under the chute, about 3000 feet up.

On the way down, I took control of the parachute, and got to turn it around in a few loops before he took over when we got close to the ground. We did however, get to talking a bit once the chute opened and you could hear again. He had asked me to put my hands in front on my harness so I didn't accidentally pull the reserve, which he stated has happened before at low altitude. He also mentioned that he crashed last year when he was by himself, hitting the ground at over 80 mph, breaking his ankle and collapsing his lung. Ouch.

I asked more about it inside and a girl filled me in. His reserve had got tangled in his main chute and something that should have detached didn't, so down he went. It was a faulty part on the chute from a company that has now gone out of business in England. From what the girl stated, he was an interesting guy, having been in a coma 3 times before from accidents related to motorcross. Oh well, I'm still alive.

She said it was all so funny now, because when it happened, everyone was going "Gee, poor Mikey." Now, however, is a different story, as it somehow has turned into a profitable even for him, having been flown all over the world. He was even on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Way to capitalize on your misfortunes, I guess. With over 7000 jumps under his belt, I guess this was a longshot for it to happen. There is an interesting article on what happened here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/
news.html?in_article_id=435377&in_page_id=1770 Have a read.

Tomorrow I think the plan is to leave and head to Rotorua, to check out what Zorbing is like. If you don't know what that is, look it up. Nowhere near as dangerous but might be fun.