Its a perfectly good plane, so.......

why would you want to jump out of it?

For many tourists, NZ is treated as a giant adrenaline trip, and nowhere is this more true than Queenstown. There are so many ways of scary yourself witless here that no budget or stomach strength could do them all justice. The key therefore to my mind is to sample a couple and then run away with mind and body as close to being intact as possible.

The easiest first choice was a trip on a jet boat. The jet boat is apparently a NZ invention where a speedboat with a powerful V8 (Chevy) engine is fitted to a water jet, which fires out water from the back of the boat at rates of up to 700litres per second. The advantage of this over a normal propeller system is that the craft can travel in incredibly shallow water, at least when it is skimming along at high speed. The Kawarau jet I went on travelled through the lake around Queenstown, before negotiating barely credible sections of the Kawarau and Shotover rivers, all with regular 180 degree spins. I’ve never been on a boat before that actually went appreciably uphill, quite a hard concept to get your head around. The driver was amazing, to the point where I felt completely safe. It was a little shocking to read a local paper later to find that there had been several quite serious injuries on a competitors boat which had crashed a week earlier.

King of Cheesy grins......

Ignoring the obvious choice of Bungy jumping, I instead decided to jump out of a perfectly good aeroplane, at 12000 feet. This might seem a weird choice for someone whos not great with heights, but my reasoning was that attached to the instructor, I’d have less chance to “bottle it”. The plane took off with 9 people on board, (3 customers + attached instructors, and 3 photographers), which was incredibly uncomfortable as there were no seats, and everyone else had something to lean on. One of the selling points was the scenic view in the plane of the Ben Nevis mountain range (NZ has one too), but I hardly noticed, as I was too busy trying to avoid having my own private panic.

Nzone Jump Plane

Ben Nevis Range

Someone else coming in to land - i did jump - honest!

I quite enjoyed the parachute part of the flight, and encouraged the instructor to do some spins on the way down. The landing was very easy - simply a short run to a halt, followed by a rapid change out of the kit and a much needed tea, most of which I spilt (glad I didnt have to drive back). I got to have a look at the video (couldnt keep it as I didnt want to pay the extra $170 NZ for the priviledge), and my head was facing down all the way, and I didnt even register the camera person at all.