Jumping off the Kawarau Bridge!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Woohoo! Yes, I did it! Today I bungy jumped off of the “K-Bridge,” which is the home of the first-ever commercial bungy jumping site, established in 1988. What a rush! The height is 43 meters (142 feet) above the beautiful blue waters of the Kawarau River.

I booked the appointment yesterday and last night I didn’t sleep very well. I had some weird dreams about the jump, which involved doing some kind of training in a gym to make sure we jumped the right way. And my Mom was there! (Not to jump, just to watch!)

So anyway, I got up this morning, had a couple granola bars for breakfast, and headed to “The Station” to check in. From there, our group was bussed to the K-Bridge site, about 25 minutes outside of Queenstown. From the command central building, you could see the live action on a TV, and there was a young woman in a pink t-shirt out on the bridge who looked pretty scared!

I stashed my stuff in a locker and then went to the check-in counter to get weighed. Turns out that they have two different bungy cords – a shorter one for people who are heavier and a longer one for people who are lighter. (I was on the longer one.) They write your weight on your hand so that the guys on the bridge attaching the cord know which one to use.

Then, I went up to the bridge. There I was outfitted with a safety harness. The bungy cord is actually attached to your feet, but then there’s another line attaching the bungy cord to the safety harness. Once I had the harness on, the guys wrapped a small blue blanket around my ankles and attached the bungy cord.

There were a couple other people already there waiting, including the woman in the pink t-shirt. She ended up not being able to jump and I went in her place!

The guys asked me if I wanted to go in the water or not. It was still pretty chilly, so I said that I’d like to touch the water, but not get dunked, and they said they’d do their best. They told me to “do a nice swan dive” and when I see the water coming close to me, put my hands together over my head and tuck my chin. Okay, I think I can do this…

Then, with my ankles tied up, I hopped to the edge of the platform about 18 inches wide, looking down 43 meters to the water! (It looks a little higher than a 10-meter diving platform, I decided!) But I didn’t have a whole lot of time to look around and think about what I was doing, because the guys counted “1, 2, 3…” and I jumped!

I must go off on a tangent here and mention that a couple of the people on my bus back to Queenstown told me that I had “great form” in my jump. Must be all that diving experience!

And it was A TOTAL BLAST! Similar to my (one) skydiving experience, beyond the initial couple seconds’ drop, you don’t have that much of a sensation of falling – it’s more like floating. And the “bounce” when the bungy cord stretches and bounces back is very gentle – not jarring at all like you might think it would be. You bounce back in the air at least half of the distance back up on the first bounce, and then you get that falling sensation all over again! Then after a couple more smaller bounces, you’re just hanging upside down by your feet, swinging from a bridge!

At that point, two guys in a yellow raft on the river came over to retrieve me. They held up a white pole for me to grab, and then the guys up on the bridge slowly lowered me down while the raft guys hauled me into the boat. When I was lying on my back in the raft, the guys in the raft could get the bungy cord off my feet and the guys on the bridge hoisted it back up for the next person. I was laughing and my heart was pounding the whole time! My legs were shaky getting out of the raft and walking up the path back to the building and lookout site.

And then I decided that I DEFINITELY want to do this again sometime! (Maybe tomorrow…???)

Oh, and I do have the photos and DVD to prove it! I'll post some of the actual jump photos once I'm able to download them from the AJ Hackett site. Woohoo!