Abel Tasman – Motueka – Collinswood – Farewell Spit, New Zealand
Back to Hanna writing:
It turns out that the kayaking we were planning for today is not going to happen after all. Apparently, the tours all leave at 9 in the morning as the kayaks have to be hauled by tractors over the beach to the sea during low tide. At 9 this morning, we were having breakfast lazily after a long and hot shower and when we finally made it to the reception of the campground, this information reached us about 1 hour too late. Kayaking no longer an option for today, we head back to Motueka to get Elys first into a jump suit, then into an airplane, and finally free falling from 16,500 ft. with a yellow parachute attached to the guy attached to her! As I was drinking a superb Moccachino safely on the ground through all this, Elys will have to give a first hand account of her adventure herself:
Skydiving is not as scary as I had expected. Probably because I didn’t get much time to think. It all happened really fast and fairly automatically. After all, I was on a tandem jump attached to the skydive guide. Nothing is required from me at all apart from smiling and being cool in front of the camera and video camera. It’s probably a totally different matter when one has to do the jump on one’s own. To get a skydiving certification, you’ll need to have 25+ jumps and the course costs about $4,500 NZ dollars. I was briefed on the skydive while on the plane. Since we’re going quite high up, we were actually required to wear oxygen mask. Freefalling was a weird feeling. It felt more natural than scary. Hard to explain… The view of Abel Tasman was surreal. I’m glad I didn’t do the skydiving in New Jersey, USA. I was seriously considering it at one point. Would have ended up with shitty and polluted view of Newark. Overall, my take on skydiving: while it was a definite must do for me in life, I don’t think I can justify blowing another $500 in 60 secs. Skydiving makes diving a dirt cheap sport.
We spent the afternoon aimlessly driving along the coastline, pay a short and sand fly infested visit to Australasia’s biggest natural spring (14,000 liters out-pour a second!), buy some handmade chocolate wrapped in pink, from a pink display in a pink house and end on a gravel parking lot directly on the sea, where we spent the night before our last day together.
One Comment
I am so proud of you! You decided to travel, see the world and do crazy things and succeeded! You became kind of a role model for me, I hope I can overcome on all my troubles and problems and live my life on its fullest.