Taupo - Rotorua- Mount Maunganui
Trip Start
Jan 22, 2006
1
89
156
Trip End
Aug 16, 2006
Mount Maunganui,
New Zealand
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
So as a result we were stood outside the hostel at 7.00am, waiting for the Taupo Skydive mini-bus to pick Lynne up. Predictably it was right on time, so I waved goodbye to Lynne, who did look a little apprehensive but nothing like the nervous wreck that I'd have been at that moment in time. I went back to the room and packed up our belongings, before going to breakfast. All the while keeping my fingers crossed for a cloudless sky and hoping that my girlfriend wasn't about to be splattered all over Lake Taupo.
About 8.20am, I got a message from Lynne to say that she had done her jump and had obviously lived to tell the tale, as well as letting me know that it had been one of the most wonderful experiences of her life (second only to meeting me I guess!). Apparently she had been told when she arrived at the airfield that she would be going up on the second or third plane that would be taking off, but then just after getting into her skydiving outfit, an announcement came over the tannoy that she would be jumping from the first plane.
Apparently just as she was about to board the plane, somebody asked one of the instructors how many jumps he'd done that year so far and he replied "8000 or so".
01) A plane you'll never see me boarding
But for some reason another girl had thought he'd been asked how many people had been killed whilst skydiving that year and almost fainted when she heard his answer. Lynne was the only person jumping at 15,000ft, so she was completely alone in the plane with her instructor and the pilot. Doing a jump from the higher height meant that she got a whole minute of freefalling before the shoot opened, before a more leisurely descent to the ground.When she got back to the hostel about a hour later, she was clearly very pumped up from her experience (which she had every right to be in my book). Fortunately there was a DVD made of her jump, so after we'd checked out of the hostel, we settled down in the TV lounge to watch it. It was amazing and a little strange to watch the person sitting next to you jump out of a plane. To her credit Lynne didn't look too terrified in the footage and even managed a thumbs up to the camera person. There were also 47 photos taken of her descent but we couldn't watch these yet because the DVD player didn't have a remote control.
The Magic Bus turned up on time at 10.15am and "Cookie" our new driver ushered us aboard. After a 15 minute unexplained stop outside of our hostel, we pulled off, retracing the journey we had done earlier in our trip. So we stopped briefly at the Huka Falls and then headed onwards to Rotorua (or Rottenrua as we heard it called later in the day by our hostel owner). We had a three hour stop in Rotorua, so we took a walk around the streets (which still smelled of sulphur) before finding an internet cafe where we'd be able to watch the photographs of Lynnes' skydive.
All of the photos had been burned onto CD for Lynne, but for some reason they were taking absolutely ages to upload and we couldn't understand why.
02) Our brave volunteer
It was only later after Lynne had spent a frustrating hour trying to upload them, that we realised that the photographs were absolutely massive. I tried to attach one to an email that I was sending to my brother (Click here to see his website ) and it took about ten minutes to send. Having worked this out, Lynne was busy resizing all of the photographs when her computer crashed and she lost half of a huge email that she was sending to her Mum. Luckily the internet cafe gave us three one hour internet tokens in compensation, which was good of them.We got back on the bus and headed into Mount Maunganui, which was a lovely small town by the seaside. We were given a tour around it by our driver, where there was plenty of evidence that there was a lot of construction taking place here at the moment and it did seem quite a touristy town and was apparently quite expensive. At our hostel we were met by our genial host, Murray who would have had a good alternative career as a stand up comedian. He told us that if we didn't do our own washing up, one of the workers at the hostel had learnt origami and would fold us into an interesting shape!
Yet again good fortune was smiling on us and we found that our room was in a separate house around the back of the hostel. This meant the luxury of a living room and a television, so after visiting the local chip shop where we purchased the biggest burger I have ever seen, as well as some beer from the off license next door. We settled in for a happy night on the sofa, where we were joined by one of the workers from the hostel and Cookie, our Magic Bus driver.
There we spent the evening watching another episode of the second series of Lost, which means that we know far too many of the plotlines that haven't been shown in the UK yet (but being a kind hearted man I won't reveal them here!) before retiring to bed, where Lynne could look back on a rather strange day where she had jumped out of a plane from 15,000 feet.
