Today Pavel and Marco really wanted to go skydiving as Taupo is the skydiving capital of New Zealand and maybe even of the world, I'm not sure. I wanted a lazy day so said I'd come but wouldn't jump. Anyone who has known me for a while will know that I hate and am petrified of freefall and that there is no way that anyone would get me jumping from a plane. No way. So I went with to take pictures from below. We were picked up by a limousine from the hostel and taken to the small airfield. We met a Dutch guy called Jan in the limo and they all got geared up while I stood by and took pictures of them in their flying suits. A woman explained that it doesn't feel like falling because you go from moving fast in the plane to moving fast out of the plane which means your stomach doesn't drop and alsoThen, just before they were going to go, the pilot decided it was too cloudy and they had to wait. We waited for hours. I was quite content chilling with my book but they got increasingly nervous and in the end were told to take the suits off again as it wasn't going to clear up enough that day. They were all disappointed but took off the suits and we were just about to get into the limo to go back to town when the woman called us back and told the guys that if they went up now they could jump in clear blue sky. They ran back inside and scrambled into their gear, got paired up with their instructors and happily hurried to the bright pink plane named Pinky. Yes, the plane was called Pinky, haha. They took off and I lay back in the grass taking pictures until the plane disappeared from sight. After about 20 minutes I suddenly saw a parachute blossom out high in the sky, I grabbed my camera and within no time there were 5 parachutes gliding and swooping amongst each other towards the ground. I took as many pictures as I could, feeling an oncoming undercurrent of jealousy for the skydivers. I knew I could never drop from a plane but that parachute bit, that I would like to do. The guys landed and came rushing over whooping and grinning from ear to ear and crying that they wanted to go again and that it was not at all scary and the best thing they had ever done. I laughed and smiled and showed them the pictures which they loved and I amusedly watched the adrenalin slowly leave them grinning contentedly on the sofas in the office. While they chilled I talked to one of the skydive instructors, a Dutch guy called Hans, who told me that during the Dutch summer he lived and did skydiving on Texel and in the Dutch winter he did skydiving in Taupo. Now that's a pretty good lifestyle, hey. Anyway, we watched the videos of the guys' skydives in the adjoining cinema and then went back to the hostel where I said goodbye to Pavel and Marco who went on to Tongariro and I chilled with Jan until about midnight in the hostel. Then he went to bed and at 1 am I picked up my stuff and wandered out into the night. I was going to catch the night bus to Wellington. It left at 2 from the i-site centre so I headed for that, in the middle of the night. I remember looking up at the starry sky and smiling at the fact that I was wandering the streets of a quiet town in the middle of the North island of New Zealand in the middle of the night, as far away from home as physically possible within the boundaries of this earth and that I felt happy. I waited for the bus with a very gay Christchurch dude sitting 10 metres away chatting half to me, half to himself, complaining how the Maori and Aucklanders and North Island people in general don't seem to like him much and how he was trying to get back to Christchurch but didn't want to pay more than 20 dollars to get to Wellington so that he would haggle with the busdriver. When the bus came I got on and the only empty seat was the middle one on the back row. Bother. So I put on the seatbelt their (I was scared that if I fell asleep and the bus braked I would fly into the isle xD), clasped my bag to my chest and nodded off. The gay guy was not let on the bus. No space. Poor dude.