Key takeaways
- Not among the earliest. The first place anyone could buy a bungy jump, and it is still open.
- AJ Hackett and Henry van Asch opened the bridge to paying jumpers in November of that year.
- Land divers on Pentecost Island jump from timber towers with vines tied to their ankles.
- Hackett jumped from it in 1987 and was arrested, which was rather the point.
What actually happened here
In 1988, AJ Hackett and Henry van Asch began selling bungy jumps from the Kawarau Bridge. That is the whole claim and it is unusually clean: before that date you could not buy a bungy jump anywhere on earth, and after it you could.
The operation has run from the same bridge ever since, which makes this one of the very few adventure activities where the original site is still the working site.
Everything downstream, every operator in every country, every activity centre with a crane and a cord, is a descendant of a decision made at this gorge.
Where the idea came from
The oldest thread is the naghol, or land diving, of Pentecost Island in Vanuatu. Men build timber towers and jump from them with vines tied to their ankles, calculated so that the head just brushes the earth. It is a harvest rite, it is centuries old, and it is genuinely dangerous in a way modern bungy is not.
Film of it reached the wider world in the twentieth century, and in 1979 members of the Oxford University Dangerous Sports Club jumped from the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol with elastic ropes, in dinner jackets, and were arrested.
That was a stunt rather than a business. What happened in New Zealand a decade later was the step from stunt to product.
The distinction between the Vanuatu practice and what happens at this bridge is worth keeping clear, because the two are frequently collapsed into one story. Land diving uses vines, which do not stretch in any useful way; the tower is built to flex instead, and the calculation is done in the construction rather than in the cord. It is a considerably more dangerous thing than a modern bungy jump and it is a religious observance rather than a leisure activity.
The 1880 suspension bridge across the Kawarau Gorge
Hackett, and the Eiffel Tower
AJ Hackett was a New Zealander who had experimented with elastic cords with the speed skier Henry van Asch, working on the rubber and the calculations rather than simply on nerve.
In June 1987 he jumped from the Eiffel Tower, having got in overnight, and was arrested on landing. The publicity was the point: it put the idea in front of the world and it established him as the person who did it.
The following year the two of them turned that attention into a business, and the business needed a bridge.
Why this bridge
The Kawarau Gorge Suspension Bridge was built in 1880 to carry the road east from Queenstown, and by the 1980s it had been superseded by a newer crossing and was no longer carrying traffic.
A disused Victorian suspension bridge over a deep gorge with a river at the bottom, twenty minutes from a town that already attracted visitors, is close to ideal. It had the height, the drop, the access and, crucially, no cars on it.
The historic status of the bridge, which might have been an obstacle, turned out to be part of the appeal. It is a good-looking structure and it photographs well, which for a business built on selling people a video was not a trivial consideration.
There is a pleasing symmetry in the choice as well. The bridge had been built to let people cross a gorge without going down into it, and eighty years after it stopped being needed for that, it found a second career letting people go down into the gorge on purpose. Very few pieces of Victorian infrastructure get a second act at all, let alone one that inverts the first.
1988
The year Kawarau Bridge opened to paying jumpers, making it the first place on earth where a bungy jump could be bought. Every commercial operation since descends from.
What it started
Commercial bungy spread quickly and internationally through the 1990s. Hackett himself took the model abroad, and the company that grew out of this bridge went on to operate sites in several countries.
The broader effect was larger than one activity. Queenstown built an identity around commercial adventure tourism, and the template of taking something genuinely frightening, engineering the risk out of it, and selling it with a video attached is now applied to a dozen different activities in a dozen countries.
Whether that is entirely a good thing is a fair question. That it began at this bridge is not in dispute.
Is the original operation still running
Yes. The site operates as a bungy centre with a visitor building, a viewing area over the gorge and a shop, and the jump goes from a platform on the same span.
That continuity is the thing worth valuing. A great many firsts are commemorated with a plaque on a building that does something else now; this one is still doing the thing it was first at.
The bridge is also a listed historic structure in its own right, which means it is looked after for two separate reasons at once.
One consequence of the listing is that the jump has to work around the structure rather than the other way round. The platform, the rigging and the crew arrangements all have to leave an 1880 bridge as they found it, which is part of why the operation looks more improvised and less theme-park than newer sites elsewhere.
Does the history change the jump
Physically, no. Forty-three metres is forty-three metres and the cord does not care what year it is.
In practice a surprising number of people say it does. Knowing you are standing where the whole thing was invented gives the moment a frame, and several reviews of this jump mention the history unprompted rather than the height.
If you are choosing between Queenstown jumps on numbers alone this one will lose. If provenance is worth anything to you, it wins outright, because nothing else can claim it.
