I have to say that if I could live in one place in New Zealand it would have to be Wanaka! This place is so beautiful that I'm going back there in a few days since I only got to spend a night! The wind was coming off the lake, the leaves were changing colours, it felt like a Robert Frost Poem!! Seriously thought the people are so nice and I think Wanaka has the fun of Queenstown but is a little less touristy and obviously smaller. I'll write more about the place when I go back!
We arrived in Queenstown, "the adventure capital of New Zealand," on the 18th and I'm here until the 22nd. We celebrated our arrival by drinking ourselves silly at the World Bar, (or as my American friends call it, "The US Bar.") During happy hour you can buy a teapot of cocktail for $7.50 which sounds pretty cheap but not when you polish off three or four a night and then have 10 beers to wash them down! Needless to say the next morning was particularly rough and we were relatively well behaved the next night because we knew that today was my birthday. And what better way to celebrate your birthday by doing the "Nevis" bungy jump?!? This is the third highest bungy jump in the world, it boasts a 143m (440 ft) drop that gives you 8.5 seconds of free fall. You have to ride up the side of the Nevis Bluff in a bus before they harness you up and then put you on a cable car that takes you out over the middle of the canyon. This is actually quite unnerving as when you step off the cable car onto the suspended platform the whole thing shakes and sways in the wind and you realize that
1) This thing isn't all that stable and
2) You are about to launch yourself off it where you attain terminal velocity about a third of the way through the fall.
Seeing as it was my birthday and I was the heaviest person there (88kg so no fat jokes please!) the staff deemed it appropriate that I take the plunge first. For the last few days I've been looking at distant mountain tops and thinking to myself, "it's not as far away as it is from here to that mountain top." I thought that if I kept doing this there was a chance I would psyche myself up enough that I wouldn't be nervous. I was still nervous. But I was so excited that I was finally going to do it and I could start dreaming about something else that I was pretty pumped. I stepped up onto the platform, heard the instructor start the count down and then I took a deep breath and looked out over the expanse. I'm not kidding it was like I was in a sound proof bubble, everything went quiet and I couldn't hear a thing. Then I looked down, spread my arms and jumped out as far as I could. I will NEVER forget this feeling for as long as I live!!!
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