Day 33 – Abel Tasman National Park

The morning started with a decent breakfast at the lodge and then with the guide we drove a little bit around the coast. We then picked up the rest of the group around 11.30am from the harbour. The group is great, especially a funny family from Holland and a couple of Austrian and English girls. We went for a good hike to visit the so called Centre of New Zealand. The nature here is very beautiful and it seems like jumping back in time: little villages which seem not being annoyed by the hungry time which always pass so fast for everyone else. Life here has got its own pace. The bakery, the grocery, the shoemaker, they all seem to be part of a timeless tiny postcard-community, where the white men culture, the wild nature and the original traditions of the Maori have merged perfectly together.

The day was however for me characterized by what I probably consider one of the most mind-blowing experiences of my life: skydiving!

I was the only one, together with another member of my group to go for skydiving. It has always been something I wanted to experience; I have never had fear of heights, however, this would have pushed my limits to extreme. I was calm and confident, and the reality is that everything was happening quite fast to have time to realize what I was really about to do.

They gave me a brief lesson on how to jump and what to do once I was free falling. I decided to go for the highest altitude possible which was 16.500 feet. I put on the jumping suite and had a little chat with the instructor I was going in tandem with; he was a tall and fairly strong English bloke, which seems very confident. Confidence is something you really need when you are going to jump for the first time, so I was quite happy to put my life in his hands for 3 minutes. The weather was perfect: blue sky, almost no clouds, not too cold and practically no wind. The plane was very small: 4 people can barely fit inside excluding the pilot who is sitting in his own cockpit. We took off and I realized that this one would have been the first time of me taking off with a plane and not landing in a conventional way. Now that I am writing these lines, I am still surprised on how calm I was. Calm until the moment the side-door opened. While flying, the view was amazing but I must confess that I was more concern on how it would have been to jump rather than to look around. At a certain point I had to wear a oxygen mask because of the altitude: in that precise moment I realized that I was seriously going to jump. The moment arrived soon after: approximately 15 minutes flying and it was time to jump. The door opened and I was pushed outside with half of my body. My legs, like those of little kids sitting on a big chair, where hanging outside moving up and down while the only thing that was holding me to the plane was my right hand firmly attached to a security bar. I looked down... I could barely see the ground... the temperature was 2 below zero, and few scattered clouds hundreds meters down were waiting for me like a very grey swimming pool. That was the moment the instructor gave me the signal to jump. What can I say? I closed my eyes for one second, then I opened them again and I did it. I jumped.

I don’t think I can ever forget the first 5 seconds after the jump. Everything was spinning around, my stomach was everywhere and I really felt like FALLING into nowhere. Suddenly I found myself into the clouds and the cold and humidity was embracing me everywhere. In a blink we were out and the wind caused by the free falling was stabilizing me. All my body was well balanced thanks to the instructor who was constantly adjusting our equilibrium.

I was flying. I really was. I realized it and everything seemed simply amazing. The world was literally and physically below me in its entirety. I felt that I could see the entire planet in one simple glimpse.

Another expert diver was falling next to me... We hold each other hands and joined part of the freefall together in what could have been an elegant dance in other circumstances... The big difference was that this was a 270 Km/h dance. I did scream: I AM FLYYYYYYYYING!!!! I couldn’t stop thinking that never like in that specific moment the world was really my oyster!

Once the parachute opened, I saw the other guy keep freefalling, and it disappeared from my sight like a little bullet in the cloud. All of a sudden my ears popped and everything was incredibly quite helping me realizing how noisy the wind was during the free fall. Our speed decreased incredibly and I could finally see around me in a more relaxed way... All the Pacific Ocean was around and the land of New Zealand right below my feet. Everything happened so fast that my brain was actually struggling to process all the visions and the emotions; I was now falling with the parachute opened and I was together with a big group of birds while little tiny figures of people were waiting for us down at the airport... I thought with myself: ‘so, this is how little humans look from up here ...’.

I landed.

I was trying to understand how long it had been: 75 seconds of free falling which seemed like 10, and 3 and half minutes with the parachute. My legs were slightly shaking, and my hands were still a bit stiff from the cold...

I looked up. The clouds were really far away and I still had their taste in my mouth.

They tasted really good. Freedom, I suppose.

I made it.

The rest of the day went by quietly and we arrived at the Abel Tasman National Park where we would have spent the night. The park is really remote: only one internet connection that didn’t work because of a previous storm few days before, practically no network for telephone and mobiles and a little generator that was giving power only during certain time during the night. Nevertheless, we had a lovely barbeque having dinner and drinks in the camp by the fire, and then since the night was getting too cold, in a little lodge. I went to bed fairly early and obviously couldn’t stop thinking about the sky jump.

It was awesome!

TWIMO!!!!!