yolanda sangphugpha - journeys - new zealand

confessions of a bungy jumper

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | slideshow

What do you get, besides an adrenalin rush and a day-glo t-shirt? What is the point? From where I stood, it appeared that, like kids on a high dive, bungy jumpers got to be Luke Skywalker for a few seconds. They were taking a condensed version of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. They squelched fear, took the leap, and fell through an unknown space, disoriented and terrified. They bounced back when they hit bottom, and come back different for having fallen out of their normal selves for a few moments. Standing on the viewing platform, I would never know exactly what kind of difference a person might feel. If I wanted to play Alice in Wonderland, I was going to have to go down the rabbit hole. So I decided to jump the next day, but not without serious reservations.

The possibility of dying puts this hero's journey business in a different light, naturally. You wanna be Luke Skywalker, not a statistic. I have to admit, sheepishly, that I didn't really inquire about the safety record until after I jumped. Later, I found out that A. J. Hackett New Zealand, the original bungy site, seems to have a sterling safety record. According to their shuttle bus driver, there have been no deaths, no heart attacks, and no broken bones, even with a clientele that has included sexagenarians. There has been nothing worse, apparently, than a few folks with "bungy burn" from scraping the bungy cord, at high speed, on the way down.

People have died on bungy jumps, but not, apparently, at A. J. Hackett. I don't know anything about statistics, but I figure that a bungy jump there is actually less risky than my daily war with taxi's on my scooter in Kyoto. Safety records and statistics notwithstanding, I was scared shitless. Even before I opened my eyes the next morning , I had a sudden, sick memory in my stomach of what I was going to do, and the doubts started rolling. "I could crash and burn, bigtime. Christ, what if I DIE!? What if I have a friggin' heart attack? It could happen, it COULD." But that was idle self-torture. Come hell or high water, I knew I was going to do it. I had to know for myself what it felt like. I would regret the rest of my life if I didn't take this opportunity to ...what?....JUMP OFF A 143 foot BRIDGE? Just in case, before I left my tent for the shuttle back out to the bungy site, I scribbled a note to the people I love in my journal, feeling foolish but not convinced quite enough that such melodramatics were unnecessary.

<back | next > 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | slideshow