I start the day off wrong: as I'm taking my time with breakfast and
slowly making my way to the 134 m jump's pickup point, the bus is
leaving. I thought it was at 10 but my ticket clearly says 9:30. Go
team me.
With a $35 NZD rebooking charge, I get a spot at noon. I'm there
early. I must be starting to crash from too much travel coupled with
having to get up in the a.m., because I manage to conk out for most of
the partially 4-wheel-drive ride to the site.
Getting out of the bungee bus, I see this is a whole different
ballgame than the others. It's literally a custom-built gondola
suspended over a canyon by wires running from the tops of mountains.
I'm at least as nervous as I was for my first jump as we reach the
suspended bungee platform. I'm almost too intimidated to duct tape my
camera to my hand. I jump after the 3, 2, 1, scared witless but
loving it for the long freefall and the deep, relieving bounces. It's
creepy pulling a pin to unbind my ankles and turn myself rightside-up
after the second bounce, but it's reassuring that the winch quickly
pulls me up to the relatively firma terra of the jump platform. Even
though I'm in a rock-climbing harness, I'm holding the rope so tightly
that my knuckles are white. Watching the video, I can't see much:
basically the ground rushing towards the screen, bouncing away and
spinning around. However, the soundtrack is entertaining: I'm so
nervously reassuring myself that "it's OK, everything's OK" that I
sound like a very scared little girl.
I've really enjoyed the bungees but, like travel, it's more opened up
possibilities than made me feel satiated. For starters, I've earned a
discount to jump from the Auckland bridge; I'll have to do it if it
seems at all different than the ones I've done. Sorbing is rolling
down a mountain in a giant rubber ball and definitely high on my "to
do" list. However, I'm more interested in the other possibilities I
see. Why not something like a zorb ball but more padded, so much so
that you can drop it out of a plane and let it hit the ground without
slowing down? Wouldn't a long bungee cord high over water make for a
doubly safe flight testing system for crazed backpack-based gliders
deployable in mid-fall? AJ Hackett helped start modern bungee by
jumping from the Eiffel Tower. Could I be the first ever to jump from
the Statue of Liberty? What about Golden Gate Bridge? Would this get
me into the Guinness Book of World Records? When I get arrested,
would I be released as quickly as AJ was (a few minutes)? Are these
very bad ideas to even be entertaining?
Back to reality, or at least a dream vacation. Despite the old woman
at the tourist information desk's advice, I will be driving my
over-priced and underpowered Toyota Corolla rental car to Franz Josef
Glacier at least partially in the dark. Without radio reception most
of the time, I chug liters of Diet Coke to stay awake. But the quiet
of doing 120 km/hr down a road I've never seen through the sunset in a
country I love gives me time to think (warning: ignorant ramblings
rampant rest of paragraph). Whether it lasts a day or a dozen
decades, life's far too short to waste time being anything but happy.
Yeah, that's easier said than done. But, what's really stopping you,
and how dare it? How dare you let it? I'm gonna live a long time,
and if I'm not living dreams and defying death I'm wasting time.
Which are good thoughts as I drive this car on this road. "GRIT /
ICE" signs (not sure what it means but it often slips), at least half
a dozen bridges where traffic from only 1 direction at a time will fit
(nerve-wracking even if there isn't much other traffic), and strange
little animals that seem about to dart in front of my car ("What ARE
you?" I exclaim to one. It just sits there with its brown, bushy tail
and possum-sized body, but if it could talk I think it would make fun
of me for not knowing. In a New Zealand accent, of course.) are the
main highlights of the drive. I wrap it up by pushing the piece of
shit car to the point of slides down the last mountain before my
destination.
Franz Josef Village, population ~360 but a heaven for me. Blue Ice
Cafe has good beer on tap, filling pizza, and a free pool table. My
hungry, beer-guzzling ass is content; talkative other backpackers and
a large Fijian woman who I can't really understand but who shoots well
becoming my pool partner are icings on the cake.