Key takeaways
- From the platform in the middle of the span down to the surface of the Kawarau River.
- The free fall, before the cord starts taking the weight. Longer than three seconds has any right to be.
- By world standards it is modest, and by the standards of standing on the edge it is entirely sufficient.
- Above a certain drop the fear is about stepping off, not about the number.
The number
Forty-three metres from the jump platform to the river. That is roughly the height of a fourteen-storey building, or a little over the length of an Olympic swimming pool stood on its end.
It is the first thing everybody asks and it is the least useful answer on its own, because a height in isolation tells you almost nothing about the experience. A high diving board is ten metres and people are terrified of it.
What the number does tell you is how long the fall lasts, and that is the figure that actually shapes the jump.
Three seconds
A body falling freely covers forty-three metres in a little under three seconds, reaching something in the order of a hundred kilometres an hour before the cord begins to take the load.
Three seconds is not long. It is roughly the time it takes to say this sentence out loud. It is also, by universal report from people who have just done it, one of the longest intervals in their life, and a good proportion of jumpers have no clear memory of the first second at all.
The reason is that the brain does not lay down memory well under that much adrenaline. People remember the edge sharply and the fall as a blur, which is much of why the video is worth having.
There is a related effect worth knowing about in advance, because it catches people out. Time distortion under adrenaline is not the fall slowing down; it is the brain recording far more detail than usual and then interpreting that density as duration when it plays the memory back. You do not experience three seconds as thirty. You remember three seconds as though it had been thirty, which is a different and stranger thing.
The gorge from the bridge deck, with the river narrow and green below
How it compares
Modestly. There are bungy sites several times this height around the world, and the same operator runs a considerably higher jump on a cableway not far from here.
That comparison is worth making honestly rather than being defensive about it: if what you want is the biggest number available in New Zealand, this is not it, and it is a short drive to somewhere that is.
What this jump has instead is the bridge it happens from, which is a different kind of claim entirely and one no amount of height can buy.
Why a lower jump is not an easier one
This surprises people and it is consistently reported. Above roughly forty metres the perceived difficulty stops tracking the height, because what the body is objecting to is not the distance but the act of stepping off an edge into nothing.
That objection is a reflex rather than a calculation, and reflexes do not do arithmetic. Forty-three metres and a hundred and thirty produce the same refusal at the edge; what differs is how long the fall lasts afterwards.
Several people who have done both will tell you the shorter one was harder, usually because they had not yet learned that they survive it.
This is also why asking somebody who has done a higher jump whether it was worse is a poor guide to your own decision. What they are comparing is two experiences they have already survived, and the thing that makes a first jump difficult is precisely that you have not. Nobody is frightened of their second bungy in the way they were of their first.
43 m
The drop to the Kawarau River. About three seconds of free fall, reaching something in the order of a hundred kilometres an hour before the cord takes the load.
The rebound
The cord stretches, stops you, and throws you back up. That second rise is a substantial fraction of the original drop and it comes as a surprise to almost every first-timer, who has spent the whole build-up thinking about going down.
Then you fall again, less far, and again, less far still, oscillating until the energy is gone. The whole sequence takes considerably longer than the initial fall.
The rebounds are also, for many people, the enjoyable part. The first drop happens to you; by the second one you are present enough to notice where you are, which is upside down over a river in a gorge.
How close you get to the water
That is a choice rather than a fixed fact. The crew set the cord length from your weight, and they can set it so that you stop cleanly above the surface, brush it with your hands, or go in.
A dry jump ends with you hanging some way above the river. A full water touch means going in, being pulled out and being wet for the rest of the visit, which is the reason for the second thought about it in July.
Either way the retrieval is the same: a boat comes out beneath you, or you are lowered to it, and you come back up to the bridge.
Worth deciding in advance rather than at the platform, incidentally. The crew need to know before they rig you, and the edge is a genuinely bad place to be weighing whether you would like to be wet for the next two hours.
What it looks like from up there
Narrower than expected. The Kawarau Gorge closes in at the bridge, so what you are looking down is a slot rather than an open valley, with fast green water at the bottom of it.
The bridge deck is a long way above the surface and the river looks small, which is exactly the effect that makes the number stop being abstract.
It is a genuinely beautiful place, which almost nobody notices at the time and everybody notices in the photographs afterwards.
