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Skydiving in Australia
Skydiving is a must for every traveller. The sexy peril of the jump, the adrenalin rush of falling 12,000 feet and the feeling of having pushed back the boundaries, man, stoke the fire of the adventurer’s self-perception. As a committed skeptic of the year-out creed and also a frequent pant-wetter in frightening situations, I always found the prospect of falling out of the sky absolutely terrifying. However, having done it, I would rate it without hyperbole or self-congratulation as one of the greatest achievements of my life.
I was roped into going skydiving on a recent trip to Australia with friends. Having arrived in Sydney, we’d been up the East Coast for about a week when we came upon Peter Pan’s travel agency in Byron Bay, NSW. They offered an attractive raft of adventures for what we thought was a reasonable price of $750 (two weeks later, when we had resorted to busking in campsites and had even considered eating each other, it seemed like less of a good deal). Skydiving was included in the package at a 30% advance discount, although given that we still paid $230 (or £100) for our five-minute fall, the pursuit was still the most expensive portion of the trip. As I sat outside Peter Pan’s dragging hard on a post-transaction cigarette, I seriously wondered if my ancestors, when they signed up for various wars in the name of King and Country, could have been as terrified as I now was.
The jump was pencilled in for Tuesday 28th July, only two days after we handed over the dollars at Byron. This was just as well; if I’d contemplated the act any longer, I may have backed out. Indeed, I remember walking around Noosa, the city in which we were staying, in a horrified daze during the hours before the jump, just willing time to rein in its horses and pull back so I could grab my wallet off the Peter Pan counter and opt out of this venture. All-you-can-eat Chinese (yes I know, damn champagne travellers) never tasted so bad, my normally commendable attempts at bestial binge eating limited by the granny knots being applied in my stomach by some nefarious colonic cub scout. Indeed, to my horror, the clock actually seemed to speed up in the hours before our descent, pushing me into this nightmare from which I feared no return.
We arrived at a run-down airstrip on the Sunshine coast early on Tuesday morning, our group of four joined by nine other intrepid souls who all seemed just as scared as us. Unfortunately we were allocated the last of the three jumping slots, meaning we had to hang around while the other two groups left and came back again. The morning passed in a loose-bowelled blur of small talk and forced smiles. My mood was worsened when a member of the second group returned to tell us her parachute had failed to open at first; the eloquent passages such as “BEST THING EVER MAN!”, “TOTALLY WICKED YEEEAAAHHH!” and “ON THE EDGE AWESOME TO THE MAX WOW!” in the comments book doing nothing to assuage my fears.
As any theme park fanatic would tell you, the ascent is the worst bit. As we climbed, that servant of hell inside my stomach began to crank things up a little. A bunch of local professionals got up and jumped out, and I steeled myself for following them. To my horror, I realised that we were only half-way up! Given my state of increasingly morbid terror, it seemed best if I jump out first. The moments before the jump were not helped by my Slovakian instructor’s attempts at humour, which were about as welcome as George Best at a Temperance Society meeting. And then, and then…
The doors opened; almost too surreal, so horrifically beyond our human capacities to be terrifying. Course I’m not really going to jump, I can’t do rollercoasters and now this, man wasn’t meant to fly, I can’t make out anything on the ground, this can’t possibly work, there’snotrackorroadoranythinghowcan
wegetdowntherewithoutsomeconnectiontoitmyinstructor’swaitingformetogo
everyone’swaitingformetogooooohhhhhhhhoooo
And then the wind ripping at your face, trying to pull it off like a Scooby Doo mask, your eyes bulging, ears popping, you’re too engrossed in this completely one-in-a-lifetime experience to pull some cheesy pose, every gnawing, prosaic, selfish thought superseded by a base, primeval desire to keep breathing normally, to prevail in this life vs. death contest in which victory will make everything else alright. Your whole life stripped away, leaving only the stomach-churning tension of falling out of the plane, then a fatalist exhilaration because, well, you’ve jumped out, nothing you can do now, whatever happens happens, at least you’ve done something memorable. And then the joy as the parachute opens. Then anticlimax, not the joy of a safe, peaceful descent, more a disappointment that the heroic edge has been blunted.
More everyday feelings return; the parachute straps are digging at my crotch, actually that really hurts, better squeeze my nose to let the air out, feeling nauseous, mate can we stop the swaying, ok we can’t, you know best. Can see the beach below, god we’re going out to sea, oh no we’re not, mate could you let the straps a little looser, oh no of course you can’t, you’ve done over 9,000 jumps and I’m just some forgettable student. Do you like music? Punk rock hey, don’t know much of that but I can sing stuff I like to you if you want, ok you don’t want me to do that, no of course you don’t, we’re landing now anyway, feet in, errr, this could go wrong if I don’t do this right …….
And then the landing, the joy of knowing everything is alright and feeling all those vicious thoughts which have been drip-feeding their poison into your brain slowly slither away to fight another day. For now, and now is my whole life right now, everything is alright; I even hug my instructor as I get up in a feeling of pride and self-satisfaction. The bleached white beach is an appropriate landing site, its powerful beauty a manifestation of the epicurean empowerment we all felt on our descent. The untainted timelessness of the beach augments the magnificent a-mortality of the skies, each facet a counterpart to the other, testament to nature’s unyielding resistance to civilization.
In truth, although the 45 second freefall is the terrifying bit of skydiving, for me it was the most exhilarating, all those nagging, feeble, life-sucking thoughts replaced by the infinitely bolder, more positive feeling of total fear and then, for a second, when the instructor pulls the straps, total, utter bliss. I now understood why everyone who has been skydiving (well, apart from the one bloke whose parachute didn’t open) loves it forever. It doesn’t matter who you are up there, there are no constraints or superiors, no depleting feelings of inferiority or envy, a major reason why people love it. The world 12,000 feet up has a brutal power of its own, ignorant and contemptuous of civilization and time, a pocket of moments self-governed by their own, brief rules which engender a set of uniquely pure, jagged emotions, totally divorced from real life, for this isn’t real life, its almost like it’s not happening. And then the landing; no matter what all my mates did in life, however many fit girls they pulled, however well they did at law school or in the city or at sport or whatever, I’d done this. And, when I’m dropping the kids off at school on a wet Monday morning in twenty years time, before heading into my dead-end job, I’ll still have done it.
Later in the trip I met an Irish bloke called Ian and persuaded him to go skydiving, persuaded him it was worth the money. I met him at the pub the following night and he grinned at me and thanked me. The feeling of pleasure I felt for him was nothing compared to the feeling I got from doing it myself. Maybe I was becoming a convert to the traveller’s credo after all.
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