Queenstown: Embrace your fear...

"Yes, I'd like to book the skydiving trip for tomorrow, 10.30 a.m.", you say, even before your credit card has the slightest chance of screaming for help. A totally normal, short little sentence that (as it often happens in life) brings quite a lot of luggage with it.
Embrace your fear, the broschure says that's trying to sell you skydives from 9'000, 12'000 and 15'000 feet. The price varies according to the jump height: The higher, the longer the free fall is and also the more expensive. Because that's what skydiving is apparently all about: Who cares about the amazing view on the beautiful scenery around Queenstown, it's all about just jumping out of the plane and going -WOOSH- downwards like a stone. Or more like the a Ferrari, as the flyer suggests, zero to 200 in just 12 seconds.
You like the flyer, it makes you feel good, feel strong. It talks encouragingly about the jump and about you doing it: That it needs a strong character to actually jump out of a flying airplane, that it will change your life forever, that all your senses will go into overload as you jump out there against every little primal piece of survival instinct in you. But the flyer also warns you that nothing will make this experience any easier: The highly trained, experienced professional jumpmaster strapped to you, the high-quality space-age-material your gear consists of, the professionally packed up parachute on your back and its equally professionally reserve chute that would open in case of an emergency, none of that will eventually matter: Still every single bit of your being will fight against you jumping out of a perfectly fine airplane.
But you're not there yet anyway. After booking the trip, you have a good nights sleep and the next day at 10.30 a.m. you sit in the shop with the other potential skydivers, looking at the videos of previous skydivers like you, easy, relaxed. One of the staff asks you every other minute if you're alright, how you think about your flight, etc. But you're cool, you're relaxed. Even relaxed enough to notice that cute smile of the girl behind the counter trying to smile and talk you into buying the DVD-Video-Photo-CD-Postcard-Super-Duper-Motherfucker-Megacombo on top of your jump. And before you even know it she has smiled her way into your creditcard and you buy the package.
Then you go with your fellow "greenhorn-skydivers" to the little airport where your plane will leave and where you'll eventually also return - one way or the other... In the supercool slang of skydivers it's also called "dropzone" which you think from an outsider's point of view is a not such a good term for a landingzone. If there'S anything you DON'T want in the next couple of hours it is being "dropped" anywhere. It should rather be something along the lines of "zone for super-safe and comfy landing after a nice, little flight around".
Still you're being asked if everything's ok every other minute. which it is. However, you have to admit you do slowly feel a bit funny in your stomach, either you're in love or you're slowly getting nervous. It doesn't even help that there's a constant flow of happy smiling adrenalin-soaked people in jumpsuites around you, and that "Awesome", "Cool", "Amazing", "Sooooo good" seems to be everything anybody can say about it.
So you get into you own jumpsuit while a guy introduces himself as your jumpmaster and starts strapping the stuff over your body that will most probably keep you attached to him (and even more importantly, the parachute) during the flight. And he really, really, really makes sure that everything is strapped tightly to your body. Very, very, very tightly, I-don't-need-blood-in-my-legs and I-never-wanted-kids-of-my-own-anyway kind of tightly... Until then, you're excited too much even remember his name for longer than 1.2 seconds even though in that defining moment of the jump he'll be closer to you (or strapped tighter to you) than you ever wanted a man to be.
And you're getting even more nervous seeing the so-called professionals packing up the "used" parachutes on the other end of the building. That's the professionals? No super-duper high-tech machines, no top-notch technicans in green laboratory suits, but these badly shaved, baseballcapped, baggypanted bunch of, well, guys?! Is that maybe my chute that guy there is handling? What if he's in a bad mood or didn't get enough sleep or was out getting pissed yesterday and now can't focus well enough on his job? What if hasn't get laid for some time and is just a bit off? What's that knot there in that line? And is that hook there supposed to look like that?
Then finally, it starts, the plane starts, the whole thing takes of... wait a minute, the plane?! This supposedly flying equivalent of a plastic raft, that thing's going to take us to 12'000 feet? I could hook my little Mazda 121 at home up with a propeller and two wings and the look of it wouldn't be much different from this. So the exit of the plane is not going to be a mental challenge, but also very simply a logistical one: How are nine people (three jumpers, each with a jumpmaster strapped to them and each with their own photographer) supposed to fit in there, not to mention exit from there in an orderly kind of way? But before you get too much time to think abou it (which is probably intentional that they don't give you time to think about anything), you're already in there, squeezed in with the other eight, sitting on the floor of the plane, and hey, who would have thought, it actually is able to fly after all.
And it goes up and up, "Wow, what an incredible scenery there", and it goes further up, "What's our height now, oh, only just half of it, ok, I see", and it goes further up and further up, a red light flashes as your jumpmaster gives you and the gear a final tight strap ("Thanks dude, my balls defnitely needed it even tighter, thanks a lot for that"), the red light changes into green, "Hey, why the hurry, we're just getting to know each other here, it's so nice and cozy, let's enjoy the view for a bit longer... HEY, STOP THE PLANE, MAN OVERBOARD... AND WOMAN ALSO, STTOOOOOOOPPPPP... Hey, why am I moving toward that open door, wait a second, no, wait, I'm not ready yet, I'm cold, I need a second pair of socks, my protective googles don't fit, hey, why am I hanging out of the plane, dear lord, hallowed be thy name, you AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH(BreatheBreatheBreathe)AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH...
The feeling of falling out of the plane (you can't really call it jumping, at least there was no jumping on my behalf involved) is kind of similar of just jumping off a high cliff or just something very high. Except that it goes on and on and on and that everything is falling and twisting and turning and the plane is somewhere above and the ground somewhere else, somewhere in the undefined open you're falling through, everything is above, below, left and right at the same time, directions are concepts from a former life far, far away. The 45 seconds of "free fall", as promised in the flyer, are exactly that, up until the last letter of those two words. However, as the pictures and the video show later, you have failed miserably in your plan of playing the cool motherfucker for the camera during the jump: Your face is just one big hole, one single constantly screaming mouth, everything around it distorted in a grimace of sheer terror and fear.
Compared to those first seconds the rest of the flight is rather chilled out: Some twists and turns the jumpmaster makes on your request give you the feeling of being in a rollercoaster, but mainly you just hang in there (quite literally actually) and enjoy the same amazing view as on the plane, only this time without any windows or walls interrupting. Also the landing is a piece of cake, following the ass-on-the-gras-concept (at least from my perspective): One moment you're still in the air, thinking "Hm, we're quite low already, but aren't we a bit too fast to land now?", the next one you're already on your ass in the grass, slinding along for some metres, until you finally come to a stop and the chute collapses on top of you, ending your skydive.


As indicated in the last blog entry Queenstown prides itself on its numerous acitivites, like the above described skydiving, like rafting, all sorts of bungeejumping, bungeeswinging, riding a speedboat, etc. However, in all that excitement it seems to be a bit of an overlooked fact that Queenstown is actually set in an absolutely amazing scenery in the Southern Alps, amidst snowy mountains and right next to a beautiful lake, with scenic views waiting on every corner. Luckily there's two of us, so while I was checking out the whole thing from a bird's perspective (or a flying Ferrari's perspective if you prefer), Lukas was driving around, documenting the beauty of these surroundings with hundreds of pictures. And when we met again a couple of hours later he as a photographer and dedicated admirer of beautiful landscapes was just as excited and happy as me who had just fallen out of the sky :-)