Fall with such grace...

So I jumped out of a plane. I say jumped when I was pushed. His name was Grant and you would get the impression that he didn't like me, but he was kind enough to attach himself to me and have the decency to have done over 11,000 skydives previously, so he knew what he was doing.

Up here the world curves the wrong way.

Immediately when you "jump" out of the plane the knee-jerk reaction in your mind is "What the HELL are you doing?!" Falling out of things into nothingness isn't the most natural of things for a human to be doing and to tell you the truth we're more of a landing-dwelling species. I've always found myself as being on or near to ground at pretty much all times throughout my life so far and found that even flirting with gravity for kicks can be dangerous (broken limbs a-plenty).

Above the clouds.

I did the jump over by Wanaka, about an hour from Queenstown. From the plane as we were climbing up to 15,000 feet you could see Mount Cook 120km away so was pretty lucky to get such a clear day and fantastic views.

The famous dream of falling, but I didn't wake up at the end. For some inane reason you had to dress as a clown.

Everyone point at cloud 9. There was quite a party going on.

Knowing the vague physics of collisions I didn't really rate my chances of body-checking the world at a fairly quick speed but thankfully the parachute opened successfully. I was a bit annoyed at "Grant's" selection of parachute. Could have at least picked one with flames or a go-faster-stripe. Manly pink? Don't think so.

Was a fun trip, glad I did it, but for some reason it wasn't the extreme rush that I was expecting. It's more of a "blink and you'll miss it" experience. I dread to think of the dollar per second burn rate on it.