Skydiving

Wednesday, June 9th. Woke up at 6am in the morning to get ready for skydiving. I don't know why but I wasn't feeling extremely excited like I thought I would.

There were four of us from the hostel that signed up to jump out of a plane at 14,000 ft.

They came to take us to the drop zone, which was in a place called the North Shore. The drive was quite long, over an hour. Everyone on the bus was really pumped. I felt quite sleepy though. I wanted to sleep a bit more that morning.

We arrived at North Shore at around 9:30am and were promptly given 10 pages of waver forms to read and sign. Printed on every page in big bold letters was a reminder that jumping out of the plane was dangerous and we would be signing our lives away. There was also a video telling us about the same thing. Apparently my travel insurance does not cover this activity. I wonder why?

Time to suit up. A short guy around my height came up to me to suit me up. He turned out to be my instructor and eventually we will be strapped together. I felt at ease when I heard that he was one of the oldest and most experienced instructor in the company.

Time to load. It was a tiny plane. There were no seats for us, just two rows of benches. That worked out better because each of us were already tied down to our instructors. I took a few motionsickness pills beforehand so that I would not repeat the kayaking incident in Sydney.

Time for lift off. It was quite loud in the plane when we were taking off. Lots of rattling sounds. Don't worry, the plane didn't fall apart. It took us about 15 minutes to get up to the right height. During that time, I was scaring the camera lady with my fake puking sounds.

Time for us to fly! We sat in the first position by the door. So I was the first one out of the plane. We inched up to the door as it began to open. It was hard to move quickly because I was attached to another person. I was a bit scared when I was starring out of the plane. The jump happened really quicky. One second we were in the plane, then boom, we were flying in the air. I was a bit frighten the moment we lept out of the plane. That lasted about 5 seconds. Then I was calm.

Air time. We were in free fall for about 60 seconds. I forgot to scream when we lept out of the plane but I made up for it during the free fall. Ouch, my throat. We were falling so quickly, it was difficult to breathe at certain times and I had to force myself to do so. After a while at free fall, about 30 seconds, the view was still the same as when we jumped out of the plane. It was hard to tell that we were getting closer and closer to the ground. But I could feel that we were falling really fast because the skin on my face was being pulled really hard by the wind. I later found a small bruise on the side of my cheeks.

Parachute time. When it was time to pull the chute, I expected a forceful tug for the transition. Surprisingly, that didn't happen. It felt like a gradual slow down in speed. We were up there for another 5 minutes.


In the evening, Chris came to pick me up and we went to Coconut Island. This is a private island, solely used for marine biology research. This was also where Ingrid was based. I cooked them a beef stir fry dinner to thank them for their generosity.