Imagine a beautiful day when the sun is shining and there is neither a cloud or a plane in the sky. You know that in a few minutes you can’t return. Suddenly it starts and your heart is running faster. There are a lot of cameras and you have to smile all the time. But your stomach doesn’t feel like laughing. You put your life in the hands of a person you just met a few minutes ago. All the time they tell you that everything is normal, but the engine is that loud that you understand just a few of these words. If you look out the window the ground is further away every minute and at the same speed, your heard rate goes up. After a while you arrive at the height and somebody opens the door. The cold fresh air hits your face. Your heart almost blows up. Everything goes really fast and then you jump out of the plane.

In a few seconds you reach top speed and your face is flattening in the wind. Below you is Lake Taupo and you are that high, that you can see all over the North Island. You just enjoy the fall down. After 60 seconds the free fall is over and your guide opens the parachute. With the open parachute you sail to the ground. After a very pleasant landing on your bottom, you can watch the landings of the others and just enjoy the new experience. At exactly this minute the fear changes to happiness.

You can have this experience in Taupo. It’s very expensive but it is worth every cent. There is a big travel industry in Taupo and you can do almost everything. There are a lot of possibilities and everybody wants to earn something from the huge amount of tourists. Skydiving is one of these possibilities. There are two companies which fight over the visitors. Both of them also earn money by selling souvenir stuff, and filming and taking pictures during your jump. They clearly know that the customers will buy everything after their jump. In addition this auxiliary income is one of the best advertisements.

Skydiving in New Zealand is very well-known because it‘s the highest in the world. In all other countries the air traffic is too dense and the companies aren’t allowed to fly higher than 12000 feet. I recommend everyone to do the higher jump because the worry isn’t bigger and if you do the lower jump could want to do the higher jump after and that is wasting money. The package I chose was with a cameraman and 25 pictures. All in all it cost about 550 dollar but it was worth every dollar because without pictures and the movies nobody would believe me back in Switzerland.

Skydiving in New Zealand is very well organised. Every time it’s safety first and the professional staff help you all the time to enjoy the day. Most of the teachers have done more than 10000 jumps and know exactly what they have to do. In Taupo you can book these skydives in the middle of the city and the Skydive shuttle drives you for free to the airport and back to the city after the jump. With the exchange rate, the price is almost half of the price in Switzerland for the 9000 feet jump.

by Marco, a student at Languages International