There was that time I decided to go skydiving over the Remarkables  (mountain range) in Queestown, New Zealand. I was on a trip around the world and despite having already done a skydive in Cairns, Australia, earlier on the trip, I could't get passed the perception that Queenstown was and remains the extreme sports capital of the world. The snow clad mountain tops of the Remarkables just had to be the perfect place to jump. Again. 

I booked my jump. 15.000 feet. No biggie, really, I felt, as this was my third skydivide after Thailand and Australia, and I was starting to feel accustomed to the sensation. But this would be the highest and the most beautiful one so far. It would also turn out to be the one event that had me thinking that "this time, Makia, you really crossed the line! Now you are injured for good!".

Thing is, I had a cold, and you're not supposed to jump when you are sick. At all. The company I went with even had this written in their guidelines. Problem was, I didn't understand why. And I didn't want to dwell on it, because I had only a mild cold and I was worried they might stop me from jumping. This was stupid of me. Really stupid. Would not recommend!

Turns out when your sinuses are blocked, even slightly, you risc serious injuries like ruptured sinus, perforated eardrums, or just severe pain and bleeding. With only a mild cold, I can definitely sign for the pain thing!

We went up to 15.000 feet and we jumped. It really was the most amazing, beautiful skydive I could ever imagine. I was thinking it looked somewhat how I would expect a skydive over the Himalayas to look. Really stunning!

The free fall was of course the best part. More than 60 seconds! Those who have done skydiving will know that 60 seconds of crushing through the air towards the ground feels like forever. It's an amazing feeling where you feel the wind resistance at full speed, and you are unable to make a single noise no matter how hard you try. No oral communication while in the air!

When the parashoot unfolded, however, I felt something that the intense preasure of the wind had shielded me from up until that point; an intense cruciating pain in my left ear, and a loss of hearing. My first thought was that I had burst my eardrum. Oh no!

I spent the next 30 minutes or so trying to carefully equalize the preasure in my ears by holding my nose and blowing. It took a lot of equalizing before I felt any improvement at all (and the instructors even warned my to be really careful, or I could burst my eardrum if I hadn't already!), but finally, I heard a squeeking noise in my hurting ear, and I sensed that my eardrum had "just" been pushed inwards. I eventually managed to blow my sore eardrum back in place, and my hearing on the left ear came back. What a relief!

My left eardrum is still a little sensitive to this day. Loud music can be painful to that ear only, and my ear will spontanously from time to time feel like it is blocked with water that won't go away (y'know, like when you are in the shower and fill your ear with water). I guess the lesson learned is that you should never ever ever go skydiving when you have just the slightest cold...just like the experts bloody tell you!

There was the time I got to experience my first ever earthquake. I arrived in New Zealand not long after the massive 2011 Christchurch earthquake, and since this was the city I was heading to after I was done exploring the north island, I had the mixed pleasure of seeing just how much of the city had been destroyed.

In Christchurch I stayed at the house of a nice Kiwi woman I had bumped into while on a bus in Cambodia earlier on the same trip. This was actually a nice change to the hostels because having been on the road for a couple of months by then, this was the first time I got a bit of that homey feeling again. So while we were sitting on the sofa watching the Graham Norton Show on the telly, I very suddently heard a loud rumbling noice that lasted less than two seconds, while I felt like the room was turned around and back in place just as fast. This left me really confused for a few seconds and I wasn't sure what had just happened - until my host told me that it had been an earthquake!

We then looked it up on the internet and found that it had placed only 4,2 on the Richter scale. I could hardly believe that was it - to me, it has felt as though a small train had gone through the room in less than two seconds, so I can only imagine how the big on that sent the town crumbling must have felt!

There was that time I tried myself at the highest bungy jump in New Zealand: The Nevis of 134 metres. I had tried bungy jumping three times before, in Thailand and Ecuador, but the Nevis was my highest so far, and I was nervous already the day before the jump, so sleeping that night was quite a challenge! I got there though in the morning, and my strategy was simple:

1) I would wear the thickest coat I had brought, so I felt like something was hugging me on the way down, somehow feeling a bit safer (this trick was really easy to pull since it was winter time and minus I-don't-know-how-many-degrees celcius).

2) I would wear my long hair down, so with the assistance of wind resistance, the pictures would look great! 

3) I would focus not on jumping, but just on leaning forward until gravity did the scary job for me, so I wouldn't have to! In the heat of the moment, this meant completely emptying my mind safe for mentaly chanting "just lean, just lean, just lean!" - somehow this seemed much easier to overcome that the idea of actually jumping! 

Looks like this strategy worked, eh! What a rush!!!

Lake Matheson.

There was that time I went picture crazy in New Zealand. For those who don't know (which will probably be no one), New Zealand in Winter is a photographer's dream! It's too bad I'm not a photograhper, but regardsless I like playing around with my camera when I travel. New Zealand was a new high for that. I had been pondering buying a wide angle lense for weeks while travelling around Australia, gazing at the amazing vast Australian lanscapes with a mixture of awe and jealousy over not owning a device that could rightly capture the grandness of it all (I don't suffer from the illusion that any camera can do that, really, but the wide angle lense does help it along a bit). This longing eventually drove me to check out lenses in Australia - and to conclude verry quickly that they were way out of my price range! Which is easy, really, seeing as I didn't have a price range at all, in the way that a new lense was not a part of my otherwise tight travel budget (those babies cost more than the camera, even if you get the cheap versions!), but hey, there's supposed to be room for spontaneity when you travel, right? Right? Well, if I say so! Fortunately for me, I found just such a lense when I got to New Zealand at around half the Aussie price. Go Kiwi-land!