Week 2: continued.

So where was I? Oh yeah, the fuckers! Building the resort on the other side to freak us out! Not that the plan had anything to do with the fact that there was ample space on the other side or anything. No, it was just to scare us.

As we get off the bridge on the other side, realizing that I have never been that relieved to have my feet on solid ground, I see her: an Asian chick with a mischievous face and a dark coat that hides all the curves of her body. At this stage, this is all I happen to know. Since my current concern is only with refraining from making love to the ground since I love it so very much, I am very much able to forget she even exists.

Next the bungy master (yep- that’s what he called himself- no joke!) tells us about the technique of falling. “The what?” you ask? I agree with you completely. That’s 30 minutes of my life I want back. I’m going to fucking jump off a suspension bridge somewhere in the vicinity of the Himalayas with a Grade IV white-water river that will literally shred me like a carrot given to a hungry rabbit if the rope decided to snap. I DO NOT NEED A TUTORIAL ON HOW TO FALL! Or so I think- Later, my own ignorance nearly kills me.

Now comes the other thing: we all need to be weighed. It turns out that suspension bridges aren’t the most stables things in the world (you reckon?!) and hence need a counter balance on the bridge so that when you fall to your inevitable doom, only to be saved by a giant rubber band, the bridge doesn’t fall with you to it’s own demise. The way they make this “counter weight: is to load up a giant bucket with your own weight in water. Great! So the piddly-hung-by-3-metal-cord-bridge is actually going to be holding DOUBLE the weight of all of us, jumpers. Oh did I mention that we only get divided into 2? That means 15 people are on the bridge at any given time + staff. No let’s be nice and say that the average person is 60kg (and hence, not American), times that by 18 (remember the staff?), then double this again. This gives a rough estimate of OVER TWO TONNES. Did I happen to mention the fact that we were swaying 160m in the air suspended by a few strands of wire? This “wire” is supposedly able to support the equivalent of 3 baby elephants or your average Holden Ute with the tray completely filled. Suddenly all this seemed like a very bad idea and my GI system decided that it was a great time to become active.

Great.

I sat through the weigh-in session and felt like I was a contestant in the biggest loser, except this time, instead of fat, I had my life to lose. One interesting this about all this was that your weight got written on your hand in bright red ink. This was especially useful when looking at girls- you knew straight away who was wearing a corset to hide that flab! Luckily, Stina (that was the Asian one’s name) was not near the if-I-don’t-wear-a-corset-I’d-look-like-a-muffin-top range.

Anyway, after relieving myself of all wetting and soiling matter, I trudged onto the bridge. The moment I was over the edge of the ground, fear gripped my heart and threatened to rip it out and drop it over the side. Just because it could. Now this scene became one like Charlie the Unicorn (look it up if you haven’t): Jimbo and I started to talk the most amount of shit possible. Not only that, we were talking med facts! Our favourite Charlie the Unicorn video was long forgotten. We didn’t (for once) keep repeating random quotes and scare everyone away.
Now at some point in all this, we decided that masochism needed new champions: us. We hadn’t even jumped yet, but for the sheer value of 2 jumps being cheaper, we bought another one. So, firstly, we were going to be doing the world’s biggest swing. Then falling to our doom. Actually, both involve falling to our doom – one is fall, then go whoosh across a canyon at break-neck speed, the other is fall and go “Boing” and keep bouncing up and down ‘til your brain explodes. They both sound like terrible ideas and hence I agree with you in saying that we aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed.

...to be continued (again!)