Day 20 – Queenstown, Kawarau Bridge, Kawarau River, Seven Mile Reserve

After only a couple of days in town, I’ve succumbed to the constant bombardment with advertisements for tourist activities: I booked a bungee jump.

So this morning at nine I boarded a bus to take me to the Kawarau River. Behind me was an older North Carolina couple – we chatted about the Appalachian Trail. Next to me was a nice young Scottish woman who was inexplicably terrified for the jump. She’d done skydiving, hang-gliding, everything – and hadn’t been afraid like this until she went bungee jumping. I agreed that when the time came I would shout encouragement to coax her off the ledge.

At the bridge they weighed us, tagged our hands, and then it was onto the ledge. I was surprised by the simplicity of their basic apparatus. They wrapped my ankles tightly with a folded towel, then wrapped a strap four ways around it. It was comfy and secure. It was backed up by a standard climbing harness attached to another strap, though I would be falling upside-down so I wasn’t sure what good this would do.

Soon it was my turn. After shouting at my new friend to jump, I could hardly hesitate here myself. I thought back to Cornell and jumping into Beebe Lake: don’t look down, just jump over the edge. It was over almost too quickly – I remember screaming, and then I was bobbing gently at the end of my line, two men in a raft holding out a white pole for me to grab so they could pull me in. I had asked the guy at the top to adjust the rope so I’d get dunked, but my hands just barely touched water. These things are tricky – I had probably jumped too far out from the ledge.

I was back in Queenstown by noon, and still looking for something to do. So I rented a mountain bike and rode out to Seven Mile Reserve, where I’d been walking yesterday.  I’ve never done any technical mountain biking before, so I figured I would start out on the beginner’s loop marked in green, and hopefully graduate to blues before the end of the day.

I was wrong.  The beginner course kicked my butt.  I was skidding all over the place, and frequently lost momentum on the climbs and had to get off and push.  After a few loops around it, I was exhausted, and had started getting worse rather than better.  Time to head home.  But first, there was a long blue route that would take me to the car park, and past another green on the way.  I gave it a go.  The blue route was loads of fun!  It was actually much easier than the green one, because constant use had swept away all the pine needles from the track, and the sharper turns were banked.  There was some rolling terrain that could have been taken as a series of jumps if I was feeling braver, but I did try one of the log rides successfully.  Great ending to a fun but challenging day.