Tanzania, Uganda & Rwanda

Just when I thought my life couldn't get more crazy, I'm off for what will arguably be my biggest adventure yet! All of the visitors are gone, my roommates have gone home forever and Maggie and I are about to depart South Africa for a 3-week excursion up to Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda. We leave Tuesday evening for Johannesburg where we will catch a flight to Tanzania. We will then make our way up to Rwanda for some gorilla trekking and to Uganda to see some chimps and to perhaps go white water rafting at the source of the Nile. Then we'll head back into Tanzania again to go on a safari, scope out Mount Kilimanjaro and hopefully get some rest and relaxation on a beach in Zanzibar before flying back to Johannesburg. If after all of that we're still in the mood for adventure and are not too worn out, we may take a one week trip to Madagascar to check out lemurs...the only place in the world where they exist in the wild!

Maggie and I are both super excited to see new sights, experience new cultures and meet new friends. Along the way, I will do my best to update this blog with where I am and what I'm up to. It's gonna be awesome!

Cheers!

World's Highest Bungee Jump!

Yesterday I jumped off a 216m bridge. That's 709 feet, about the height of a 70 storey building, and 40% of the height of the CN tower. I did this utterly stupid activity at the Bloukrans Bridge bungee jump, which is near Plettenberg Bay, South Africa. This bungee site holds the Guinness World Record for highest bungee jump in the world.

Let me take a minute to remind everyone that I HATE heights. My biggest fear is falling, which is why I hate rollercoasters for that feeling of falling that I get in my stomach, and why I hate flying for the fear of falling out of the sky. This fear has never prevented me from going to Wonderland with friends or making a dozen international flights in a year, however, I would much rather take repeated punches to the head than have to endure that horrid dropping feeling in my stomach. My previous adventure-seeking has led me to try hang-gliding, parasailing, and skydiving with no problems. I loved all of those activities because they spared me having to feel that dropping feeling in my stomach. In fact, the only reason why I made the decision to go skydiving was because I heavily researched the sensations you feel beforehand and was satisfied with the general consensus that you feel like you are in a wind tunnel, not plummetting towards the ground. This turned out to be true and I loved skydiving because I felt like I was flying, not falling.

Since I had gone skydiving, which I consider to be one of the most significant extreme adventures that a person can do, I figured that I didn't even have to do bungee jumping because I had surpassed it in extreme-ness. Last year before coming to South Africa however, my brother (Trevor), my friend (Maggie) and I were looking up extreme things to do in South Africa when we stumbled upon the Bloukrans Bridge bungee jump. We got nauseous looking at other people's jump videos on YouTube and decided then and there that it terrified all of us so much that we simply HAD to do it when and if we all ended up in South Africa together. Last year, I stopped at the bungee jump on a road trip with friends, however I refused to jump then because I vowed that if I was ever going to do it, I was going to do it with Maggie and Trev (which seemed like a safe bet to never actually happen since it seemed less and less likely that Trev was going to come to SA). And now here we are a year later, with Maggie living with me here in South Africa and Trevor visiting us for a couple of weeks. Judgment day had arrived.

I spent the few days leading up to our jump preparing Maggie and Trevor for the fact that I was probably not going to jump with them. I had played the scenario of me standing on the edge and jumping 216m over and over again in my head for the past year and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't seem to force my brain to accept the idea of me jumping off. The morning of the scheduled jump, we all went ziplining in Tsitsikamma forest, along with Maggie's mom who is also visiting. I was 100% positive that I wasn't going to jump. We arrived at the bridge at midday and I watched as Maggie and Trevor nervously made last minute bathroom visits and signed their lives away. The men who got Maggie and Trevor suited up razzed me for not going jumping as well. They managed to convince me to spend $5 to walk out to the bridge with the others and make a decision about whether or not to jump out there. The walk alone was terrifying. We had to walk down a path littered with signs warning us of deadly cobras along the path. Then we had to walk along a 200m suspended cage, which had an open mesh floor and sides. Stupidly, despite being told otherwise, we all looked down! Out at the bridge, I sat patiently as Maggie, Trevor and the other jumpers were assigned their jumping order. One by one I watched as each jumper was called up to the platform, had their feet bound and were carried out to the edge. Maggie jumped second and Trevor jumped fourth. Both looked incredibly nervous. They stood on the edge as two men held onto them and counted down from five and then over the edge they went - sometimes with a loud scream and sometimes silenced by fear. We all watched them drop on a video screen from a camera that was positioned over top of them. Both Maggie and Trevor came back grinning from ear to ear. They both exclaimed that it was the best thing they had ever done in their lives and that it was way more intense and a way bigger adrenaline rush than skydiving. They said that I absolutely had to do it or I would regret it forever. I spent the next half hour on the bridge, trying to find one ounce of potential regret in myself that might make me want to jump. I couldn't find any. I just really didn't want to do it. I knew I would absolutely hate every second of it. They even strapped me in to take a peek over the edge, but still, I wasn't budging on my decision. Maggie and Trevor were disappointed with me and as we made the walk back off the bridge to the registration centre, they razzed me about how I was going to regret my decision. "Fear is temporary, regret is forever," they kept telling me (that's what's written on all of the souvenir tshirts you can buy). While they were watching their video recordings and purchased their DVDs and photos, their jump leader came in with certificates to hand out. The certificates said that they had completed the world's highest bungee jump. Suddenly, I was overcome by envy. I wanted a certificate!! Haha. I didn't want to be sitting around with Maggie and Trev as they recounted their experience to all our family and friends and proudly showed off their certificates. We had all done all of our other extreme adventures together and now they would have one up on me. I simply had to get one of those certificates for myself! I walked up to the registration desk and asked the woman if I could join the next group going out. Maggie, her mom and Trevor all looked stunned, but quickly capitalized on my sudden change of mind and scrambled to get me out there as fast as possible before I changed my mind. They even each paid to come out to the bridge again with me to give me moral support.

Fear was gone from me as I walked back out to the bridge. Mentally, I was like steel. I was jumping and even though I knew I was going to hate every second, I kept repeating to myself : "this too shall pass". All I had to do was endure a couple of minutes of hell. I watched as 4 or 5 people jumped before me. Then suddenly, the jump team signalled to me that it was my turn. I stood up and calmly walked over to the platform. I sat quietly as they bound my ankles together and attached the bungee cord. Then, before I knew it, two men lifted me up and carried me out to the edge. "Whatever you do, don't hesitate," they said. "And don't look down." .......too late for that, I had already been given a glimpse over the edge when I was there before with Maggie and Trevor. I knew what a gorge looked like from 216m in the air already. There was no turning back now. No time for hesitation. I was jumping. The second that they had me at the edge, they started counting down: "5, 4, 3, 2, 1, BUNGEE!!" And then suddenly, I was swan diving out into nothingness... and then falling...and falling....and falling. As I accelerated from 0 to 125km/h, I groaned as the wretched dropping feeling in my stomach consumed me. I just kept begging for that feeling to pass. And then, a few seconds later it did and all I could feel was the air rushing around me. I opened my eyes and looked down at the ground flying up towards me. I felt so disoriented. Then, just when it felt like I had been falling forever, I felt the bungee cord pull on my ankles. Contrary to how it looks, my body didn't snap and flail all over the place when the bungee cord stretched to its max. It was actually a very smooth and very comfortable feeling. My body floated back upwards to 80% of the initial jump height (about the height of the Victoria Falls bungee jump) and then plummetted downwards again. I sort of yo-yoed like that for a minute, which felt like an absolute eternity. I was so disoriented and I was crying, telling myself that it would be over soon. "You're okay, you're okay," I kept saying aloud. Finally, I felt myself stabilizing and being pulled upwards. One of the men on the bungee team lowered himself down on a rope from the bridge to where I was and pulled me into a seated position. I threw my arms around him in fear from being suspended, dangling above the gorge. He laughed when he saw my tears and how badly that I was shaking. "It's okay. You've done it. You never have to do it again," he said. We were pulled up to the bridge platform very quickly, where I was lifted up onto a grated floor. I sat there, trying to compose myself so as not to scare the other jumpers who hadn't gone yet, but I couldn't help but notice that my legs were shaking as I laced my fingers tightly around the grates in the floor. I stumbled back to Maggie and Trevor and threw my arms around them in a big hug. They told me they were so proud of me for doing it and I agreed that I was proud I had conquered the world's highest bungee jump, but that I would never ever ever do that again! As I walked back to the registration centre to buy my DVD and photos (I needed proof to remind myself that I did it because my mind had immediately tried to block the traumatizing experience from my memory!), I excitedly accepted my certificate from the jump leader. That's all I wanted. That piece of paper with proof that I had jumped. Maggie and Trevor laughed at how all it would take to get me to do something I didn't want to do was offer up a certificate for it.

I'm so glad that I jumped, but I only did it for the personal satisfaction of knowing that I did something that I was terrified of and that I hated so much. When things seem really shitty or we are faced with a really bad situation or are stuck doing something we really hate, we just need to remind ourselves that "this too shall pass". If I can endure my worst nightmare, I can endure anything. We all can.