Musings from Germany

Got the opportunity to travel to Germany for NI. What fun! Here's an abbreviated list of observations from Munich. Also have some things from Aachen which I'll get up eventually.


1) Beer costs less than Coke here.
2) Germans don't like long drinking toasts. Gets in the way of drinking. Prost!
3) Germans love American music. To an unhealthy extent.
4) Most Germans known English. My theory: because of #3.
5) Ausfahrt means an exit on a road (like an interstate exit). I think it sounds like "Ass-fart". When I tell the Germans this, they find it hilarious, too.
6) Everyone here is at least bilingual, if not trilingual. Makes me feel undeveloped. Or American. I constantly tell the "if you speak one language, you're American" joke.
7) An old German man kept talking to me in German on the subway, after I told him I spoke English only. I just nodded and laughed at random intervals, and that kept the conversation going for 15 awkward minutes. I think he was talking about being fat (he kept gesturing at his gut).
8) There are very few fat Germans, but there aren't that many fit Germans either. Unlike America, where we tend toward extremes it seems.
9) Eating German food is like being at the state fair all the time. Tastes great, but definitely will kill you and it gets old after a while. This might be why everyone seems pretty young here.
10) You measure beer consumption in Liters. It's a brilliant system. 1 Liter of beer for dinner, 2 to get drunk, 3 is too much. Beats counting ounces.
11) German cabs are nicer than your car. Unless you drive something better than a new Mercedes with leather seats.
12) The German public transportation system, in a word, rocks.
13) Germans love karaoke, to a fault.
14) Germans made me do karaoke. To a fault (obviously).
15) The best way to do a German accent is to say it like you're mocking them. Then it actually sounds right.
16) If a German is talking loudly to you, it's very difficult to tell if he's telling a joke or about to kick your ass.
17) There are a LOT of bikes here. You are more likely to get run over by a bike than a car.
18) The autobahn does kick ass, if there's not traffic on it. I got the company car up to 185 km/hr (~115mph). Not bad for a diesel.
19) I think you can count the number of Blacks here on one hand.
20) Germans put weird shit on pizza. Prosciutto, Tuna, Olives, peppercinni, lettuce, salami, etc.
21) There's a Hard Rock Cafe here. I hate that place.
22) I found an all-you-can-eat sushi buffet. The waitress spoke perfect English, Thai, and German.
23) We went and saw some local German bands play. Surprisingly, not all German music sounds like Rammstein. It probably should.
24) Don't bring up the war.

More to come...

Back in the USA!

Okay, if you have followed this at all or ever talked to me in the past two months, you'll know that I'm back in the states. Sorry I was too lazy to post it here.

My new adventure has been moving to Austin Texas. I'll cover these trials and tribulations at my normal blog:
Paul's Blog. Enjoy!

SCUBA diving on the reef

Number of hours of continuous sleep: 2

Today is SCUBA diving day. Our 3-dive tour is scheduled to pick us up at 7:30AM. Getting up wasn’t too hard, because I’m used to being up at 8am for my early class for the past few weeks. Like I mentioned in the last post, drunk people kept waking me up last night, so I was a little tired. Hopefully, I can sleep on the boat a bit.

We arrive at the marina, which is loaded with very expensive boats that I should own one day. Our coach for the day turns out to be a 25 meter (82 feet) catamaran that appears to be fairly new. These guys are cut out for the high seas, thank goodness. A friendly crew greets us, about 15 or so young divers and ship mates. After a humorous debriefing by who appears to be the head SCUBA guy (bug the captain, don’t piss off the chef, etc), we lounge around for another half hour until we get to the reef.

The boat itself is a two-story twin turbo-diesel catamaran which moves quite quickly, about 30-35 knots from what I can tell. The lower deck is specially designed for diving and contains a recharge station for about 40 diving tanks and a special deck that lowers to water level to help a diver loaded with 50 lbs of gear to get out of the water relatively easily.

Our first dive was scheduled for 10AM. We were split into groups of four with an instructor/guide per group. Since noone in our group was certified, there was a brief lesson and limits as to what we could do in the water (“Do NOT push this button!”). Fortunately, our guide has a good sense of humor and liked to have a good time.

By this point on the trip, I now know my wetsuit size after wearing them 4 previous times. This is strange. We get geared up with a wetsuit (which we turned out to not really need because the water was warm), flippers, goggles, a weight belt, and of course, an air tank. I had forgotten the secret to getting goggles not to fog but was quickly reminded – hawk up a nice loogie and rub it around on your goggles before putting them on. Brilliant!

We hop in the water and we practice a few important SCUBA maneuvers, like recovering you regulator and getting water out of your face mask. After we get our basics down, our instructor does her trademark happy dance and we go for a swim. On one of the tanks we were using, you can last for about 20-30 minutes under water before having to surface. They were pumped up to about 3100 PSI. Lotta air in a little space.

This was my first time diving, and it was an incredible experience. Being under water for more than a minute is fascinating. You can’t hear anything, it’s like you’re in a dream world. Once I got the hang of only breathing through my mouth, it was natural and I almost forgot about my SCUBA gear. I was initially scared that my ears wouldn’t be able to handle the pressure, but once I mastered equalizing the pressure, it didn’t bother me at all. The ecosystems on the Australian Great Barrier Reef are nothing short of amazing.

Floating around down there is like visiting another planet in another dimension where you’re weightless and hearing isn’t a sense. The colors were absolutely amazing, and the pictures don’t often do justice to what we saw. Right away we saw some of the millions of corals, anemones, and other animals and plants that made up the reef. The size, shapes, and colors were like nothing seen on land. The variety of fish was nothing short of amazing, either. Between gigantic schools of little tiny fish to beasts the size of us, there was everything imaginable just in the small area that we were in.

Our instructor led us to a sandy spot and we found a sea slug the size of a football that you could toss around. She explained the creature’s anatomy to us by referencing her own—pointing to the slug’s mouth and then her mouth, the slug’s butt then her butt, etc. Laughing underwater can get you in trouble, so I had to resist.

We swam along, and basically went on the Finding Nemo tour. We saw a clownfish in its respective sea anemone Of course, we took a bunch of pictures. I was in a tough position seeing as I have a very itchy trigger finger and only had 27 exposures at my disposal. So, I was a little more judicious with the photos on this dive, and with 3 dives in all, that makes for 60 pictures… We’ll find out soon if they came out.

After 20-30 minutes of quality diving, our guide ushers us back – Clark managed to run low on air first and thus earned the title “Air Slut” well before any of us were getting close to the critical 50 bar (500-1000 PSI) range. Maybe he just had big lungs…

Surfacing was painless. You don’t have to clear your ears as you go up; the air just seeps out of them. We swam back to boat, climbed in, toweled off, and prepared for our next dive. I reloaded my underwater camera and prayed for it not to leak anymore.

The other two dives were more of the same, except we had more freedom since we didn’t have to go through a training session again. My camera seemed to leaking a little bit, but I hope the pictures still turned out (film is pretty tolerant of water). For some reason, I felt like I was a little too counterweighted and had problems sinking a little too much, so when my instructor wasn’t looking I put some more air in my vest (which they told us not to do). Oh well, it helped me out. Apparently, if you put too much air in your vest and you start rising, it expands and you rise faster and the next thing you know you’re on the surface with the bends and busted eardrums.

The trip back was uneventful and consisted of a combination of reading and sleeping. I managed to hop off the boat and leave my hat on, of course I don’t realize this until after I returned to the hostel.

From what I hear, 8 people a year die diving in Australia. Fortunately, no one on our trip became a statistic.

We call it an early night after eating a delicious AU$7 buffet (all-you-can-eat, hell yeah) at the hostel. We have to be up early for a 6:30AM depature on our deep sea fishing trip!

Cheers,
--P

Off to Cairns!

Happy St. Patty’s day!

So I woke up this morning, did the class thing, and did my final errands before heading to the airport. While wandering around, buying film, and getting my daily Kebab (I’ve lost count now), I try taking a picture of a street artist only to find that I have indeed broken my digital camera.

A moment of silence for my fallen camera.

I compensate by buying more film for my underwater camera. With a week left, it should hold out. I did some math, and after 6800 pictures, and factoring the cost of the camera at $300, that’s $.05 a picture. I’m doing pretty well.

So anyway, the gameplan is to go to Cairns, get a little scuba diving in, some fishing, and possibly tool around on some ATVs to wrap up the weekend. With a majority of the people from our trip going on this little side trip, it should be pretty interesting.

Now, you might be asking yourself, “how do you pronounce ‘Cairns’”? I still ask that question. The Aussies say “Cans”, which would give the word not one but two silent letters. Aussies have a funny habit of moving around ‘r’s, adding them to some words and removing them from others. The most blatant example of this is when a Aussie says “No”. It comes out as “Nor!”, especially when they get agitated. Other examples:
• English: “Hello” – Aussie: “Hellor”
• “Melbourne” – “Melbon”

I get my stuff packed up, and head to the airport by myself. Since I buggered up my ticket that was booked with everyone else originally, I booked a different one through the local budget airline, JetStar. Brisbane has a train, akin to MARTA, that runs to the airport every few minutes. It’s pretty expensive - $11 a trip, but is cheaper than a cab I suppose.

Because I’m used to catching flights out of Atlanta, I get to the airport way too early. After getting through security (and having my umbrella examined and my pocket screwdriver confiscated), I kill some time by eating some shitty Aussie pizza (I have yet to find good pizza or hamburgers in this hemisphere) and devouring a Dan Brown novel.

A word about Jetstar airlines. This is by far the most cheaply run airline I’ve ever seen. They only fly low-end Boeing or Airbus planes. There are no assigned seats. Boarding is done by first-come-first serve. The gate doesn’t have a jetway—you have to walk on the tarmac to get into the plane. I was surprised that the pilot wasn’t outside throwing baggage onto the plane.

On board the plane, every seemed more or less like a normal airplane, except the stewardesses were charging for everything, even soft drinks! Disappointed (but not mad, you can’t ask much when you fly the Greyhound of the skies), I passed out and slept for most of the flight.

To Jetstar’s credit, however, they did have the most gorgeous stewardresses I’ve ever seen on an airplane.

The hostel that we picked out was nice enough to pick us up from the airport. After some confusion from 30 of us checking in at once, we get settled in and try to sleep for the night. Seeing as it was St. Patricks day, this proved to be more difficult than anticipated. Normally, I would have participated in the festivities, but after being up since 7AM and having our scuba trip departing early the following morning, I didn’t want to go out.

Being it was a hostel, I got put in a room with 5 other random people, who randomly turned out to be extremely drunk most of the night and coming in and out of the room at all hours of the night. They were never in there long enough for me to wake up to yell at them, but they sucked at life. At least the room has air conditioning – Cairns is quite humid and warm.

Long day tomorrow.

--P

The Prodigy, Live in Brisbane!

TOUR SOME MORE: Our first of many architecture tours was today. We’re starting to feel the routine of it – but it’s still interesting. Brisbane, like every other Australian city, is a port city. It’s built inland on a river that is quite curvy. This makes the city hard to navigate if you try to reference your position by the river.

Unlike other Australian cities, timber is abundant here and thus most of the residential houses are built of wood unlike the common sandstone structures in Sydney. To avoid having to level land, most of the houses are on stilts too, much like you would see in a town on the east coast that regularly dodges hurricanes.

We do get to see a neat art museum. One piece that stands out is a sculpture that reminds people where the high water line is for floods – it’s the word “Flood” but it’s built to look like the cement is coming up over the sculpture. Of course, we climb on it and take pictures being the mature adults we are.

Josh and I get yelled out for talking on the bus while the professor is trying to lecture. Oh well.

When we get back from the tour, I take a nap, eat dinner, then go looking for someone to accompany me to the Prodigy concert that night. Tyler finally agrees to tag along, being a fan of the music.

PRODIGY!! The venue is called “The Arena Complex”, which to me sounded like a nice big place where there will be a huge crowd. Should be nice, I figured. When we arrive at the place, I was quite surprised to learn that the Arena was in fact, not an Arena by any stretch o the word, but a large bar capable of holding about 1500 people. For this kind of concert, this would be extremely cool.

Unfortunately for us, the show was sold out, so we came prepared with Aussie Bucks to look for some scalped tickets. After a few minutes of nagging people as they went by, two large, intimidating, drunk, jolly guys offer a ticket to us. After some brief haggling, I couldn’t get the guy under $100AU, so finally accepted his ticket. He promises to buy me a drink inside too, which was nice of him.

Now, it was time to get Tyler a ticket. We ask around for tickets for another 10 minutes, when someone finally directs us to a fellow standing down the street wearing a bookbag. We approach the guy, who was looking conspicuously nonchalant. I was instantly creeped out by this guy, because he talked in a low, monotone voice, made excessive eye contact, and made unnecessarily long pauses in the conversation. We finally get a ticket out of the guy, and we were set to go in.

The inside of the place was relatively tiny. The dancefloor was approximately 30 feet square, and an upper balcony ran around the room. The total floor area of the place wasn’t much larger than that of a basketball court. Now, imagine a sound system that stretched to the ceiling. By my educated estimates, it was at least a 50,000-watt system. Adam Freeland was the opening DJ, of whom I’m a big fan. This guy was real good, and he got the crowd going with some of his tunes. He randomly mixed in “Song 2” by Blur, which really got people excited. After he got us good and sweaty, he finished his set, and the stage hands clambored on stage to revel the Prodigy set behind the curtain.

First off, I wasn’t expecting much more than a pair of turntables and couple of MC’s jumping around yelling at us. I couldn’t be more wrong. As the curtain dropped away, I was stunned to see an entire setup more complicated than most rock bands. An elaborate drum set, two guitars, a bass, and some mic stands surround a futuristic console of 5 keyboards, 2 computers, and a bevy of miscellaneous equipment.

Apparently, you can play electronic music completely live. I did not know this.

A minute-long build up intro played to get every into the mood, and the band marched out on stage. The band itself dressed in usually wacky-musician with crazy hair attire.

But first, a word about Prodigy’s music. It is the definition of pure hard energy. A typical Prodigy song is like a workout—it warms you up, slams you into a constant frenzy, holds you there ‘till you’re exhausted, gives you a little break, then lays it on again. Liam Howlett, the man behind the music, manages to pull this off nearly every song without using the same song over again is beyond me.

So, knowing this, my expectations were quite high by this point after seeing the set. I wasn’t disappointed. As the first song rose to its crescendo and slammed into it’s full energy, it hit me like a freight train and I couldn’t do anything but dance. The sound was deafening but crystal at the same time, and the lights were blinding and in perfect sync to the music. The total package made the entire room explode into dancing/jumping/whatever you have it and was amazing. And this was the opening song.

Prodigy has high expectations of its fans, and we had to work hard to keep up with them. I was completely soaked by the fourth song, and exhausted by the time they wrapped up the set. They played songs off their new CD, as well as their classics – Firestarter, Breathe, Smack my Bitch Up, and more. At the end, I couldn’t handle anymore as I was exhausted, dehydrated, soaked, and every last bit of euphoria in me spent into the air. It had been only an hour and half. What a rush.

Simply put, this was and probably will be the best concert I have ever been to. It’s unfortunate this group doesn’t have plans to currently tour the states, but if you ever have the opportunity to see these guys live, don’t pass it up no matter how much it costs.

Afterwards, we mustered up some energy, got cleaned up, and went out for a bit. Nothing much came of that, but it was fun still.

Sorry I’m posting this out of order, but I had to get it down before I forgot it. The older entries are still coming, promise!

--P

Life at the end of a rubber band

Pictures

Okay, now I’m actually writing this in march, when this happened over a month ago. But I have my numerous pictures to jog my memory!

Today is extreme bungy jumping day. Ian went out of his way to get us booked on AJ Hackett’s THRILLOGY bungy jumping tour, which includes 3 jumps from world-famous spots. On our way to the first jump, I notice the guy who drove our van to the canyon swinging place, where I conveniently lost my camera the previous day. On a hunch, I ask him if he found it, he says yes, and I have to restrain myself from jumping on and hugging me. I settle for jumping up and down like a little kid on Christmas, instead.

With my precious camera in hand, I’m ready to rock and roll and we head to the station to get weighed in and ready to go. We make a few practice jumps while waiting in line. I find out that I weighed in at 80kilos, or 176 lbs. Need to eat some more food.

BUNGY BACKGROUND: Before I continue, let me give you some bungy background. It was first popularized by AJ Hackett, one of your typical Kiwis with a complete disregard for personal wellbeing. I may have mentioned this before, but New Zealand is very conducive to extreme sports as it is near impossible to sue operators for negligence or injury should your dumb extreme-sports self meet up with the wrong side of the ground, shark, or failing parachute. In exchange for this limited liability, the Kiwi government will compensate you directly if you get injured/maimed/killed/castrated/etc.

Any, AJ Hackett somehow figured out it would be fun to jump off a bridge while tethered to giant homemade rubber band. I suppose the first site was over a river so if the cord was accidentally made too long, at least the water would break your fall. We definitely saw some videos of ancient Africans performing similar feats, but it seems that the Kiwis were to first to commercialize this business.

What disturbed me most was when I learned they still custom-make their bungy cords on-site for their jumps. I was assured by several different people that the cords would hold you even if they were severed more than halfway through, so this comforted me a bit

Anyway, back to the bungy.

KAWARAU STATS:

• Height: 42 meters (137 feet)
• Strung up by: Ankles, backup waist harness
• Jumping from: A bridge

Once we get our forms sorted out, sign our life away again, and rummage through the souvenir shop (I refrain from buying anything until after I have completed the jumping alive), we hop on the van and head to our first site, Kawarau, coincidentally the world’s first Bungy site.

So this site uses the popular string-em-up-by-the-feet-hog-style method of attaching you to the cord, which is actually fairly primitive. It consists of a towel wrapped around your ankles, with a cord simply tying you to the main bungee cord. For backup, you’re clipped to a safety harness so that makes us feel a little better.

The dude at the site asked me how wet I wanted to get. I said “A light dusting”, and I see him let out the cord quite a bit. On second thought, I went ahead and took off my shirt just in case. Good thing, too. For maximum scariness, I decided to jump backwards off the platform. It was pretty extreme, if I do say so myself, and I did have pretty good form in the process too.

After my light dusting, which turned out to be a full torso dunking, replete with freezing water, they reel me in on the raft and untie me. That rope gets pretty damn tight on the ankles, but better to have no circulation than to let gravity take over!

Conclusion: Bungee jumping is extreme, my pulse definitely took a while to come down, and now I’m pumped for some more action. Good thing this was the beginner jump—bigger ‘n better things to come!

Our next stop was at the Nevis, one of the world’s tallest land-based bungee sites.

NEVIS STATS:

• Height: 134 meters (440 feet)
• Jumping from: High-tension cable-supported jump pop
• Strung up by: Releasable ankles with full-body harness backup.

I thought I had gotten over the initial fear by going off the first jump, but this proved me wrong. Once I saw the jump pod suspended over the canyon, my knees definitely got a little weak. I wasn’t the only one who was nervous, some of the girls were practically flipping out (I won’t point out any names here to protect the (somewhat) innocent).

To get out to the pod, we had to take a cable car which was quite small and shaky. When they had us clip onto the safety line in the cable car, I knew this was going to be extreme.

This bungy site was far more advanced than the first one, with lots of winches, ropes, cables, buttons, pulleys, etc. I guess the workers wouldn’t have liked hauling up a 100-meter long rubber band by themselves. The worst part about this one was the little dentist chair they had you sit in as they strapped you onto the cord. This was mainly because you knew you couldn’t go back at this point.

Actually the worst part is stepping out to the edge with the cord pulling at your ankles and nothing but canyon underneath you.

Once you actually jump, the fear changes to exhilaration quickly and it is one extreme rush. This jump was so tall that once I rebounded, the second free-fall was still longer than the first bungy jump of the day. After the second or third rebound, you’re supposed to reach up to release your feet from the bungy cord, so you’re just hanging by the harness. This helps keep you from killing too many brain cells from the blood rushing to your brain. I must say though, it is rather unnerving to unhook part of yourself from a bungy cord, no matter what else is attached!

THE LEDGE BUNGY:

• Height: Approx 50 meters
• Strung up by: Full body harness, at the waist
• Jumping From: Ledge extending from the side of the mountain

This bungy had us suspended from the waist. The advantage to this is we could jump off however we wanted. I elected to try the “running man” all the way down, and the results were fairly humorous. This one was by far the least scary of the three, but I still had a lot of fun doing it.

EXTREME STREET LUGE: A nice unexpected gem at this final bungy site was a downhill street luge course. The idea is simple; cost a souped-up-skateboard down a racetrack, ride up on a ski-lift, and do it again. The speeds were pretty damn fast, and we had a blast doing it. The experience reminded me of Mario Kart for humans. I knew it would be fun once I saw that helmets were required, but I was rather surprised when I didn’t have to fill out a won’t-sue-if-I-get-maimed-or-killed waiver. At $5 a run, it was a bargain.

CASINO: I was thrilled to learn that Queenstown had a casino. My logic was that I had survived all the extreme events thus far, so obviously my luck was good. Since I like playing streaks, it made perfect sense to hit up the casino. Sure enough, unlike the other nights, I came out a little bit ahead and was back even for the trip.

Once again, this weekend is packed, and we have to be up and at ‘em early to catch our flight back to Wellington. Being up since 7AM really takes the steam out of you.

--P

Canyoning, Swinging, Jetboating, oh my!

Pictures

EARLY RISER: My morning began early, against my will, when the fire alarm convienently went off around 4AM. I was dead asleep, but it’s hard to sleep through an alarm when the siren is just feet from your head on the top bunk. It’s rather surreal being woken up in this matter, as it took me quite a few minutes to figure out exactly what was going on and if I was actually awake or not.

Of course, it turned out to be a false alarm, and the entire hostel grumbled back inside, cursing the unknown forces that set off the alarm, and we got a few more hours of treasured sleep. 7AM arrived much too quickly, and we were up and getting ready for extreme canyoning.

CANYONING: Now, if you’re like I was, you’re asking, what is canyoning? In a nutshell, it what’s you used to do in the neighborhood creek/river when you were a kid, but on an extreme level.

We were picked up by our canyon guides out front of our hostel. Our group added on two more people, a guy from California on the tail-end of his honeymoon (but the wife didn’t want to come), and a German backpacker girl. The two tour guides rode up front. The passenger passes back a waiver for us to sign, while the driver slams in a techno tape and we hit the road to the canyon site.

We don’t talk much until we get there, where we’re fitted up for wetsuits. This is the third time I’ve put on a wetsuit on this trip, so I now know I wear a size 4. At this point, I’m still not quite sure what we’re getting into, but as I strap on a climbing harness, I assume it will be fun. The guides introduce themselves as Swedes who have been doing this for quite some time. They apologize in advance for their “Swinglish” and tell us to make them repeat themselves if we don’t understand them.

Our outfits are capped off by helmets (another “extreme indicator”). Mine is labeled “Elvis”. One of the guides notices I got the Elvis helmet and says “You know, zee King?” as he thrusts his hips around. I laugh and confirm that yes, I am indeed familiar with Elvis.

The trip starts off with a little hike (all hikes are now little compared to our Mt. Doom trip). At the top, we encounter a zip-line. Excellent. Our guide gives us a quick rundown of what to do: “Just run as fast as you can down this hill”. Check. Being the intrepid soul that I am, I decide to go first. I clip on, start running, but apprehensively. After all, I am headed straight down a canyon. Fortunately, the zip line takes hold and carries me across the canyon, a good 80 feet in the air or so.

I come up a few feet short of the end, so the Swede on the other end has to pull me in, chastising me for not running fast enough. I feel a little bad until I see the rest of the group comes up shorter than I did on the line. Suckers.

Next up, we have to rappel into the canyon. Unlike the abseiling we did in the cave a few weeks ago, this was controlled by the guide. All we had to do was walk down the face of the canyon and he would control our descent. This went pretty smoothly, and the group assembled in the canyon.

The basic idea at this point was to simply traverse through the canyon. There was a moderate stream running through it that turned out not to be as cold as I expected. What made this extreme was that we would jump off and slide down everything we could in the process.

Our first stop was a small rock slide, a few feet. The guide shows us how to go down, and once again I end up being the guinea pig. For this slide, I crossed my arms, sat down, and slide down backwards, head-first, into the pool below. This was rather disorienting, shocking, and fun at the same time as the cold water gave me a nice surprise. I was fortunate to be wearing the helmet as I slightly brushed a rock with my head on the way down.

We romped down a few more small slides like this and then came to our first big slide. This one was a good 3 meters or so tall (10 feet) and was a chute of water plunging into a pool below. It was rather intimidating, but the idea was simple: just keep your arms in and legs together and go! This was quite fun, as the slide terminated earlier than I expected and dumped me through the air the rest of the way.

Once we all went down that slide, it was time to learn how to jump from tall places into shallow water. Oh boy. We climbed up a rock face, and after quick instructions, jumped 9 feet (your typical high-dive height) into a 3-foot pool. Basically, you have to make as big of a splash as possible as to slow yourself down as quickly as possible. Seeing as none of us were crippled in the process, I assume we all did it correctly.

The rest of the trip was more of the same. I chickened out on one jump that was too high into too shallow water for my liking. (“If you don’t do this right, you’ll probably get hurt”). No thanks! Fortunately, most of the group chickened out as well so I didn’t feel too bad about it.

One pool we had to do a belly flop into to avoid hitting the bottom. I should have done it on my side as I banged up the boys a little bit as I hit the water. Oof.

We returned, got unsuited, and I laughed as Kun tries to get Dan out of his wetsuit.

JETBOAT: Our next extreme activity today will be Jetboating up the Shotover river. What is jetboating? Take a jetski, make it hold fifteen people and add horsepower to boot, and you have a jetboat. Throw in a clinically insane driver who likes to drive up a narrow river, and you have the Shotover Jetboat.

This was much more commercialized than I expected, with an intro video on the bus and processing that resembled that of a theme park. We meet our driver, who makes the expected “Unfortunately I’m your driver, this is my first day” jokes. I was rather disappointed by the lack of seatbelts on the boat, that meant there was little chance of us getting tossed out. The boat pulled away from the dock, we do some quick manuveurs for the camera, then speed up the river.

The river itself is absolutely beautiful, with the bright blue-green water we saw in the lakes on the way here. Much of the river is surrounded by canyon, which makes for an interesting time while speeding through it at 40mph.

The jetboat itself was quite interesting. It was powered by two supercharged engines, each putting out 250HP or so, giving the boat some 500HP. This sounds like a lot, but for a boat it isn’t all that impressive. The boat itself could operate in about 4 inches of water, which I found very interesting. This was also very useful in the very shallow parts of the river.

One of the trademarks of jetboats is doing the little hockey-stop maneuver where the driver cuts hard to one side and guns it, making the boat spin around in its wake. This is pretty fun the first few times, but gets old after a while.

The trip lasted for about 30 minutes or so, and we head back after that and get some history behind the river in the process.

All in all, the trip was fun but probably the least extreme activity we’ll be doing this weekend. I wish I could drive the boat, now that would be interesting.

CANYON SWING: Apparently, New Zealand has some bored people. There’s no other way they would come up with this stuff. Canyon swinging is our final stop of the day. What is Canyon Swinging? Well, apparently someone got drunk and decided it’d be fun to swing out on a 100-meter cable over a gigantic canyon. Brilliant!

It is basically a really really big version of the swings you rode in the playground as a kid.

We arrive there in one piece in a van that’s been retrofitted with racing-type seats for all of the seats. Whoever installed them was a bad welder and half of them barely held together. Extreme. The employees at this place remind me of aging California surfers.

A brief hike brought us to a interesting little canyon swinging compound, consisting of a few structures barely clinging to the side of the canyon and some interconnecting stairs. The place seemed like it was put together by a skilled craftsman without much engineering background. The cables spanning the canyon were impressive, and we contemplated how the heck they got them installed.

The canyon itself was huge, spanned a few hundred feet from cliff to cliff, and had a small river at the bottom. I didn’t appreciate the scope of the canyon until I saw a kayaker coming down, who was a small dot from where we were standing.

I was second to go in our group. The harness was fairly complicated, complete with shoulder, leg, and waist straps and a lot of buckles and clips. They got it on me quickly enough, and before I knew it I was teetering over the edge of the abyss below. While extreme, these guys had other people to “process” and wasted no time in getting me through. After some thought, I picked my fate as falling backwards off the platform. I can’t emphasize enough how scary this is. Gravity is fast. 9.8 meters/second^2 is very fast. You don’t realize this until you’re plummeting away from a platform, and you temporarily forget you have something to catch your fall.

The freefall was intense, lasted for a good second or two, and then the harness started pulling me in the huge sweeping arc across the canyon. From the platform, you can hear the whooshing noise of the unfortunate swinger (if it isn’t masked by screaming) as they careen across the gap. Once I was settled into the swing, the rest was pure fun once my adrenaline flattened out.

It was definitely a great way to kick off our extreme weekend.

On the ride back, we get out of the van, only for me to realize that I have left my camera behind somehow. I panicked, because that little thing is my lifeblood (if you haven’t noticed by now). There is a noticeable gap in the pictures that night, but hopefully I’ll find it tomorrow.

Cheers,

--P