I guess we were closer to cows than I realized that night (once again behind. been a crazy few days).
Smelly night. 🙃
Every time I woke up in the middle of the night, it was like–yuck.
But whatever. Is what it is.
I spent some time writing another catch-up post. I’m almost caught up… again. 🙃
I woke Chase up because i needed to use the can pretty good, and we weren’t in the wild, so I couldn’t… use the facilities.
So we headed back over to Hokitika Gorge. I think it was about 9ish maybe? Then we sat in the car for a good, long time. I don’t remember exactly why. I think Chase was writing in his journal or something? I don’t remember.
The place filled up quickly and was packed in no time.
Huge tourist destination, but whatever. It was gorgeous. 😊
Chase got on his wet suit (a choice I should have made as well 😬. I only grabbed my swimming suit.), And we headed down the path we’d followed the night before.
We headed to the little mini cliff jumping spot that we had seen yesterday, and I jumped in. 😁 It was only probably a 15-foot drop off, but we did that 2 or 3 times. Then Chase jumped in and floated down to check the depth of the water under the swing bridge.
It took a little bit, but as best we could tell, it was plenty deep enough, so Chase went up onto the bridge, climbed over the cables, i got the camera ready and hit record, and boom. Jump #1 in the books.
It doesn’t seem like it’s that high… until you’re looking down. 🙃
It was my turn next. 😅
That bridge is probably the highest thing I’ve ever jumped off into water. Compared to what others have done, it’s pretty much… well, not much 🙃, but it was super cool, and a decent bit scary.
And I was off!
Down, down, down! We never did time the drop on that one. We did on the taller of the two bridges (about 2.25 seconds or so for the rock to fall and hit the water, but we never did the drop test on the one we jumped off, so we didn’t actually know how a high it was. We just jumped.
And jumped.
And jumped some more 🙃.
It was easy to keep going again and again because all the other tourists (this was our second tourist-central location we’d been to) kept coming and were excited to see two crazy Americans jump off the bridge to the insanely blue waters below. 🙃
We had some people tell us that we ought to charge for people to see us jump, as i think our jumping was just as exhilarating for them to see, perhaps even more so, than the crazy-blue water below.
So that was super fun. 😃
The crazy thing was that even after 12 jumps, the 13th was still scary!! 😅
Somewhere around maybe my 6th jump, I jumped poorly and shot water up my nose so forcefully that it actually split the inside of my nose and went all the way through and into my ears.
That… didn’t feel great.
Oops.
Gratefully, the sinus headache didn’t last very long, as I was able to get the water back out of my head pretty quickly… that time. 😬
Chase suggested that I lean back just a little bit as I was about to go into the water in order to keep the water from going out my nose. I also never remember to breathe out through my nose like I should as I hit the water.
The leaning slightly back helped quite a bit, as I no longer got big splashes forced up my nose. 🥳
We kept going on and going until we’d jumped 12 times, jumping again and again mostly for the fun reaction we got from the other tourists (though it was fun either way).
Last jump. Lucky 13.
Somehow on my last jump, I totally forgot to lean slightly back, and i got water so forcefully thrown through my sinuses, that I had immediate sinus issues, and though I made it to the rocky exit point of the river, couldn’t keep my balance for a little bit. I asked Chase to hang with me for a moment because I had no balance.
My balance came back quickly, but significant sinus pain and pressure continued. And unlike before, I couldn’t get it all out.
I tried everything I could think of, everything that worked the last time, but nope, it wasn’t too be.
That was our planned final jump anyway, so we headed back to the parking lot.
From the Hokitika Gorge walking trail, we headed to another blue river area with another swing bridge that looked interesting.
Once we arrived, I was in enough pain and discomfort that I told Chase I needed some time before embarking on our next adventure.
I then spent probably the next frustrating hour, trying to get the water out of my ears. My sinuses were totally stuffed up, so i drank a crap ton of water, which opened up my sinuses but didn’t stop the pain. No matter what i did, I couldn’t get the water out of the pain to stop. It was that kind of pain that’s not excruciating, but bad enough that you can’t mentally get away from it. At least, I couldn’t anyway.
Chase had also hurt his chest while jumping, and it was a little painful for him to take deep breaths.
So we were both a tad beat up.
I did notice that my pain was less as long as I was eating, so i just kept eating. 🙃
After a while realizing that I wasn’t going to get the water out, I just told Chase we should just keep doing our thing, as there was nothing I could do. So we started heading up the trail to the other swing bridge. It was a washed-out 4WD road, basically, that we got the car fairly far on before calling it and walking the rest of the way.
This swing bridge was tiny. More like something I could come up with to build. It spanned probably a 150-foot gap, and was only rated for one person at a time, so that’s what we did.
The sandflies were terrible, but I’d brought my jacket and long pants, so i was good there. Chase swam in that river as well, jumping off a couple rocks and whatnot, but I was definitely done.
We skipped rocks across a tranquil part of the river in probably the most perfect place I’ve ever experienced for skipping rocks. The water was pretty flat. The rocks were perfect, and even casual tosses netted massive numbers of skips. Chase even got one that was the size-ish of his extended hand to skip all the way across, which at that point was probably at least 100 feet.
It was fun. 😊
We headed back, dealing with a few little challenges getting back up obstacles (with the car) that we went down, but with a bit of pushing, we made it.
We headed south from there, planning to visit a hot water river, but it was late, so we camped near the river–in a sand-fly infested place of sand-fly awfulness. 😬
And… that was the day. We might have watched some episodes of The 100. I don’t remember. I think we’re probably done with that show.
Anyway, let’s leave every person and every place better than we found them 😊
Lift the World! 😊
~ stephen
Lift the World 