Chapter 7: Free Fall

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAeaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! And so I found myself falling (well jumping really) out of an airplane at 12,000 ft. That’s nearly 4km high, for the more metricated amongst us. I couldn’t believe how high the plane had climbed. The earth was receding and receding still further, wisps of cloud drifted past and below the plane, the horizon of the earth curved and bent further, and we still surged higher. And we had only actually climbed 5000 ft at this point. Ian Temple asked to jump first (fool!) and so had to sit directly opposite the open door of the airplane as it climbed. I couldn’t look, either at the open door or out the windows. Anyway, eventually it was time, and after being hitched to Phil – oh did I forget to tell you I had tandem jumper instructor named Phil attached to my back? – he told me to stand up and the next thing I knew I was somersaulting out of the plane. Several rolls later, I remembered his instructions and made like a starfish. Half of the descent was free fall, and it went on for oh, about forever, in real time, and 60 seconds in clock time. Certainly enough time for the camera man plunging alongside me to get some great shots, which really look fetching save for the huge pulsating vein on my forehead, which I presume is stress-related. I’m giving the thumbs up sign and smiling, only it’s not really a smile. Rather the windspeed has forced my mouth open and I don’t have enough muscular strength to shut my mouth. Seriously. At any rate eventually Phil triggered the chute, and I got such a jerk in the process that I had a bruise in each of my arm pits. Then Phil started to do loop the loops and swirls and twirls with his acrobatic parachute. I had to ask him to stop before I threw up into the wind. Still, when we landed, I said to the video camera that it was great but I wouldn’t do it again. However, I realize that I lied. I would do it again! It WAS great! (Mum, their oldest skydiver was an 83 year old woman, so I’m signing you up too!) Except this time I want to go to 14,000 ft (much longer free fall) which is the maximum height that one can skydive from without using oxygen.

Also daring to dive out of this plane were three gay friends of mine, and a randomly assembled collection of quite the most heavenly young women backpackers. Some were from Norway, some Holland, some the UK and some Australia, but all were blonde, all impossibly lithe, tanned, beautiful and young. I thought it was curious that so many women were jumping relative to the number of men, but in fact the skydiving company told me that the usual ratio was about 80% to about 20% men, which I found very curious. Anyway, after we four guys got off the transfer shuttle back at our hotel, we all remarked how darn spooky it was how attractive and sexy we’d found all those girls were.

Where was this? Well, we had gone to Noosa on the Sunshine Coast to recover from the hedonism of Mardi Gras. The water was incredibly warm, the restaurants superb, I saw two koalas in the wild, though it wasn’t very exciting for the following reason. They sleep 20 of 24 hours, and of the remaining 4 hours in which they are awake, they only move for five minutes. (How do they get enough to eat, I wondered). Anyway, we had a great time, including a tropical rainstorm which outpoured anything I’ve ever seen in Joburg! And then I went back to Sydney to see friends and do a few more tourist things, but Sydney was raining. Yuck. Me, I’d be quite happy with sun 365 days a year. My friends dragged me out to yet more nightclubs, where I had a great time; no one smokes, they have shows of dancers, fire eaters, acrobats, and, unfortunately, the ever present drag queens, the laser lights are the best anywhere, the music is super upbeat, and the people are really really friendly.

Anyway, in Sydney, I fell in love. Yes it’s true. But, rather unexpectedly, I fell in love not with a guy, or even with the city itself. Rather I fell in love with the platypus at the aquarium. I simply must have one for a pet now. Stuff the cats, now safely at my Mum’s. It’s platypuses (or platypi?) all the way for me. I wonder how I can steal him?

Then off to Melbourne. A huge mistake for me; cost tons in terms of air mileage, taxi fares, and severely constrained the rest of my trip in terms of time. Because my time in Melbourne – which incidentally has bizarrely wide roads - was limited I made the great mistake of deciding to do a coach tour of The Great Ocean Road. Big mistake. I mean BIG. I was on a coach with the all mother-daughter brigade from China. I was the only non-Chinese person on the coach. I was seated next two a girl named Aster, who clearly didn’t understand me, or English very well, because she kept asking me the same question: Where was I going to next on my trip? Eventually she switched to: Are the girls pretty in South Africa? I think she wanted me, but her fierce-looking mother was keeping a beady eye on me. Fortunately she slept for most of the journey, waking only to cast her gimlet eye in the region of my privates and then ask me why we were driving this route so devoid of scenery. As if I knew! The bus driver was sooooooooooo annoying, as he didn’t stop talking on the tannoy for much more than a minute. I had the following "points of interest" pointed out to me (in the most annoying speaking voice I think I’ve ever heard): local garbage dumps , schools, shopping arcades where he sometimes has coffee when he comes out this way, "great beaches hidden behind those hills", where there’s "no time to stop". Eventually, we got to the destination, the Twelve Apostles and London Bridge and the scene of Loch Ard shipwreck. Well, ‘t’was pretty enough with a lovely Chinese jade green sea and milk-foamy white breakers crashing against red-orange sandstone cliff formations. Very pretty, but the Cape of South Africa still is tops for me. I was told by the bus driver, however, that I should cut the pictures out of the tour brochure and stick them in the photo album "because they’d be much better, and no one would know the difference." (So why travel? Stay home see it on TV, order your holiday snaps from an image bank and sleep in your own bed at night.) One good thing about Melbourne was that I got to see Cirque du Soleil’s new production Allegria which was great.