Skydiving !!!

Yeah !!! Skydiving !!! I have to admit that it is one of the more exciting thing I've done in my life so far :)

Together with Jin Ha & Sharon we went for this extraordinary adventure on an overcast Saturday morning.

Now for those of you who are not in the know, it works like this: we jump in a tandem together with an experienced parachute jumper. They have to have at least 1000 jumps before they can apply for this 'tandem' licence. When you jump you look a bit like the gentlemen in the first picture.

We jumped from 14,000 feet (4267 metres), the highest one can jump in a tandem in Australia and go in free fall for 60 seconds. Once you reach 5,000 feet the parachute opens and the you slowly descend back on earth.

From the moment we arrived there everything went really fast ... we got on our special jumpers and harnesses, did a bit of training on how to jump from the plane, and more importantly, how to land - You can see Jin Ha demonstrating the manouver, basically feet up @ 90 degrees and we slowly land on our bottom with the feet acting as brakes.

In the next picture you can see my tandem, a very knowledgeable guy, who explained me a lot of things about jumping as we were going up to the jump altitude. The jump moment is really awkard, because since I'm strapped in front of him i basically had to step out of the plane and hang from him while he was getting prepared. I think that was the moment when I actually realized what I was about to do. But too late ...

The jump was awesome, as we fell we turned on our backs to watch the plane going away ... a really unforgettable sight ... then we turn back, head down speeding towards earth at more than 200 km/h. The 60 seconds went by too quickly and all of a sudden the parachute opened with a sudden jolt as we were in the middle of the clouds.

The rest of the descent was nice, I was given a birds-eye view of the Nagambie lakes but couldn't compare with the thrill of the free fall.

Definitely something to try again !!!