Okay so omg today was SKYDIVING DAY! I was pretty scared, I gotta admit... We got to the skydive centre and I literally just wanted to run away. They showed us a DVD of some people skydiving and it looked SO SCARY!! I didnt want to wimp out though, especially as Vicky and Amy were doing it, so I just signed the form and carried on, inside thinking what the hell am I doing?! (i realise ive been thinking that quite a lot these past coupla weeks....) The nice lady wrote that I need 'TLC' on the form, so she gave me a really lovely but crazy Brazilian tandem-master and I certainly didn't wanna wimp out after that! So I kind of blindly walked through putting on the jumpsuits (v. fetching) and the harnesses (major chafing, lol) - and they expected us to jump around and pose for the DVD, when all I wanted to do was vom.

Anywho somehow I ended up at the front of this mini yellow plane, flying up 12,000 feet, over Lake Taupo, which is tge largest lake in the southern hemisphere and as big as Singapore. Wowza. The tandem master had this weirdo non-watch on which showed us how high we were going and when we were high enough to jump. He was like, 'so, there will basically be a little tiny bit of a scary bit, but you're allowed to be scared, basically we will sit on the edge of the plane and dangle our feet out a bit. (what!??!) I just thought omg, what if I fall out on my own!?! I didn't though, luckily. I went first out of our group and the tandem-master shimmied us over to the edge of the plane and then we kind of hovered for a picture, and I glimpsed down and saw lots of tiny itsy bitsy fields in the distance and clouds and thought WOAH. And then he pushed us out, and it was the craziest feeling ever. You literally are just freefalling thousands of feet in the air, and you can't breathe and it's just all so crazy (apparently you freefall for 45 seconds, but it felt like 10 seconds but that's because your brain automatically shuts down for a bit while it tries to work out what the hell is going on!)

I had a camera guy around too, and he takes pics and the DVD, and tries to 'interact' with you, and he started spinning me round and round, which I was NOT loving at all. You're supposed to do cheesy little high-fives but I couldn't really pull my hands down at all, the G-force had kind of frozen them, so I looked like (as the tandem-master kindly demonstrated) a Kangaroo. Lovely jubbly.

At 5000 feet the parachute opened up and then we were vertical (horizontal and upside down and spinning around until then). I was given the parachute to hold and direct us, which scared the s*** out of me, coz I thought OMG what if I drop it?! It was pretty cool though coz you pull down on one side and you zoom around to the left and then to the other side and you zoom around to the right and then the dude tried to pretend we were on a rollercoaster and we were zooming around all over the place... The view was absolutely incredible - beautiful Lake Taupo, blue skies, green fields and stuff everywhere. And I realised I'm not as scared of heights as I thought!

I would definitely do that again and all you guys definitely should too, it is bloody AMAZING.