New Zealand Bungy Jump

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

This is the first of my 2014 New Year’s Resolutions I accomplished. No, not the bungy jump, I did that 1991, but rather that I finally transferred the video to DVD & digital format. I’d meant to do it for a long time—I wanted preserve the video before the old VHS cassette tape from AJ Hackett Bungy Company disintegrated.

The 140-foot (43 meters) jump was one of my adventures during the year I took off between my sophomore and junior years of college. I decided to travel because I discovered that as a college student I was eligible for an Australian „working holiday“ visa. In Commonwealth countries they have the idea of a „Gap Year“ where students take a break from their studies to travel and/or volunteer. Working holiday visas are an important part of a Gap Year. This was new program at the time for American students and the idea was that you could pay for travel by working temporary jobs in Australia.

I ended up spending six months in Australia working in the laundry room of a hotel in the Whitsunday Islands, waiting tables at a restaurant in the Bondi Beach neighborhood of Sydney, and two months of fruit picking—harvesting pears & apples at orchards along the Murray River. After Australia I traveled in SE Asia, visiting Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Before all of that I had two stopovers on my way to Australia, which I used to visit Fiji and New Zealand. The bungy jump was from the Kawarau Bridge outside Queenstown on the South Island and part of a package deal that included jet boating & whitewater rafting. At that time the New Zealand dollar was worth only 60 cents on the greenback so it was an incredibly good deal. It was 1991 and I’m from the Northwest, so of course I was wearing a flannel shirt.