Key takeaways
- Not the jump. Almost everybody names the shuffle along the deck afterwards.
- By the time you are falling, there is nothing left to decide.
- Multiple countdowns are entirely normal and the crew run as many as needed.
- Adrenaline interferes with memory. This is one reason the video exists.
Everybody is frightened
It is worth starting here, because most writing about bungy jumping is either bravado or marketing and neither is much use to somebody deciding at midnight whether to book.
Essentially everyone who does this is frightened. That includes people who have done it before, people who look calm in the queue, and a good proportion of the ones grinning in the photographs afterwards.
The fear is not a sign that you should not do it. It is the thing you are paying for.
Why the walk out is the worst
Because it lasts. The shuffle along the bridge deck to the platform takes long enough for a mind to construct arguments, and the drop is visible for all of it.
It is also the last point at which turning round is easy. Once you are at the platform and the cord is attached there is a countdown coming, and the social and practical machinery of the thing is moving.
People who have done several jumps report that this stays true. The distance from the building to the edge is the part that does not get easier.
There is a structural reason for it that is worth knowing. Every other frightening thing at the site is either brief or out of your hands: the harness is fitted for you, the countdown is run for you, the fall takes three seconds. The walk is the only part that is long, voluntary and entirely yours, which is precisely the combination a nervous mind can do the most with.
The instant of stepping off, arms out over the gorge
The edge
Toes over, arms out, and then a very specific and unpleasant sensation as your body works out what is being proposed. Almost nobody enjoys this part.
What helps, reportedly, is not looking straight down but out along the gorge, and listening to the crew rather than to yourself. What does not help is thinking about it, which is precisely what everybody does.
The countdown exists because it removes the decision from you. Three, two, one is not a courtesy; it is a mechanism for getting past the part of the brain that is objecting.
Backing out
People do, and less often than you would expect. What is far more common is one refused countdown, then a second, then going on the third.
The crew handle this several times a day and their response is entirely matter-of-fact. Nobody is shamed, nobody in the queue is impatient, and nobody is pushed, literally or otherwise.
If you genuinely do not go, you walk back. That happens too, and the people it happens to generally report being fine about it within an hour.
One thing worth knowing if you are travelling with somebody who might not go. The most useful thing a companion can do is stop watching. A friend at the rail willing you on turns a private decision into a public one, and the crew will quietly suggest they look at the gorge instead, which is a kindness rather than a rebuke.
3 sec
The free fall. Most people report the first second as simply missing, because adrenaline interferes with how memory is laid down. One argument for the included video.
The fall
Three seconds. Most people describe the first second as simply gone: the sensation is so far outside ordinary experience that the brain does not file it usefully.
What people do report is the noise, which is wind, and the absence of the stomach-drop feeling that lifts and roller coasters produce. A true free fall does not have that, because there is no floor pressing back.
Then the cord takes you, which is smooth rather than sudden, and you go back up.
Afterwards
A very particular kind of elation that lasts somewhere between twenty minutes and the rest of the day, and shaky legs that arrive about a minute after you are back on solid ground.
The bus back to Queenstown is loud. Everybody on it has just done the same thing, everybody wants to describe it, and nobody is listening to anybody else.
The other common report is a slight flatness the following day, which is what happens when a large quantity of adrenaline leaves a body. It passes.
It is also worth eating something afterwards. A large adrenaline surge followed by a two-hour gap is how a good many people discover, on the transfer back, that they skipped breakfast because they were too nervous to eat. There is food at the centre and the bus is a poor place to be hungry.
Should you do it if you are frightened of heights
Many people with a fear of heights do this and are glad. Others find it genuinely awful. It is not a reliable cure and it should not be attempted as one.
A useful distinction: fear of heights is often about the possibility of falling, and this removes the possibility by making it a certainty on your own terms. For some people that is the whole relief and for some it is the opposite.
The honest answer is that you will not know which you are until the walk out, and that the crew have seen both and will not mind either.
