Up early again–still not sleeping well. 🙃
(I forgot to mention that the main reason I think I had such a hard time falling asleep when we first left our friends in hokitika and drove to the east side of the Southern Alps was that I had so much sugar and caffeine in my system that I was just wide awake, even a little jittery. 🙃 That was a couple days ago, but that explains at least one of the poor nights of sleep I’ve gotten.)
I worked on writing a post while I waited for Chase to get up. Again, it was very cloudy, even more so than the last 2 days. But guess what?
Almost zero sand flies!!!
It’s been so nice over the last week or so to have so many fewer sand flies to deal with. 🥳
Chase finally got a decent night’s sleep, so that was good, and once he was up, we drove back South to check out the potential cliff-jumping spot.
It’s funny, but at dusk on a rainy day when we first drove over that bridge, it seems to me like we were in the middle of nowhere, far away from any tourist destination. But arriving there yesterday… or whatever day that was (everything is crazy right now because I’m sitting in the Los Angeles airport, and I’ve crossed multiple time zones as well as a date line, and I don’t have a flying stinking clue what is what right now. 🙃)
Anyway, as we parked at a little dirt parking spot on the North end of the bridge, we realized that Not only was there a campsite right next door, but it was a pretty tourist heavy location, as companies were selling jet boat rides up and down the stunningly blue, gorgeous river.
As much as I’ve seen the blue water, hokitika gorge, the blue pools, the various lakes, etc, I’m still not tired of it at all. I’m still not even used to it. It’s just… magical. 😊
So, it wasn’t an out-of-the-way place at all. There were tourists getting in boats on the beach just a little ways downriver from where the bridge is, some eating picnic lunches with their familirs on the shore,and there were plenty of tourists walking across the bridge to look at the beautiful gorge and the stunning blue water.
And then there were Chase and I, scouting out how to jump off the bridge.
Safely 🙃.
At first, Chase wanted to jump right off the top, but I was like, I think we need to check the water first. We weren’t able to see the bottom, and so it seemed fine, but you’re not ever supposed to jump in water that you don’t know what you’re jumping into. It could be shallower than it looks. It could have logs or boulders or something where you’re supposed to land, etc.
Chase was still wanting to jump from the top of the bridge without checking, but fortunately, one of the jet boat operators came close to the bridge and let him know that the water wasn’t deep at all.
Armed with that knowledge, Chase climbed down the bridge from the top down the support beams and whatnot like Spider-Man until he was probably about 15 or 20 ft below the top of the bridge.
Then he went for it. Aaaaand?
He was ok. But it was shallow. He hit bottom pretty quickly, fortunately, not hard enough to hurt himself.
Knowing that, and knowing that either because I weigh more or because he’s a better jumper, I hit bottom generally faster than he does and harder than he does, I wasn’t going to jump even from where he did, which was still probably 25 ft (8 meters) or more above the water.
I jumped from probably 8 ft or more below where he did, and I hit bottom–not hard–but definitely hit bottom on the jump itself.
So that set off some exploration jumps. We jumped a few times from different spots on the north side of the bridge, which was the side that we figured was the deepest because it was the side that had the swiftest current.
But every jump led to the same result: the water was simply too shallow to jump from the top of the bridge safely.
😞
There was a group of 20 somethings from Ireland or something like that who were watching us jump. One of them was interested in jumping as well, and he showed us a YouTube video of someone jumping off the very top of the bridge in the middle. So Chase went over to the middle where the guy from the video had jumped, but he jumped from lower down to be safe. And what did he find?
Same thing. 😞
It just wasn’t deep enough.
Chase resigned himself to the apparent fact that the bridge just wasn’t high enough to jump safely from the top, so he was going to jump a handful more times from the highest spot he had jumped from and then call it a day.
I, on the other hand, still wanted to check every possibility, so I crawled across the bridge supports above the river all the way to the other end of the bridge, and jumped in from the lowest spot. If I’m remembering correctly, I did hit bottom.
😕
Instead of swimming down stream and getting out and going back around, I swim to the cliffs, climbed up a bit, and climbed around to a little spot where I thought the water might be deeper.
Sure enough, it was a little deeper. Unfortunately, it was deeper in a spot where we couldn’t really get to and have any kind of a meaningful jump.
I had one last shot that was realistic. I climbed back up to the side of the cliff, walked to the highest point of the cliff that I could get to and jump safely, jumped in, didn’t hit bottom, and then immediately try to push myself all the way to the bottom of the river.
But i didn’t touch.
I didn’t touch bottom!!!
The spot where I dunked myself under and tried to push myself all the way to the bottom of the river was right about where we would be jumping off if we were to jump off the south end of the bridge.
I yelled over to chase letting him know that I thought we might have a safe place to jump from higher up, but I told him that we should still gradually increase the height of our jumps just in case.
So Chase jumped off one of the lower parts of the bridge, and he didn’t touch bottom.
Then he jumped off a higher part of the bridge, and he still didn’t touch bottom. 🥳
Next step was jumping from the bridge itself. I got Chase’s iPhone to take a video of the jump, and after a little initial nervousness, I think, he jumped.
…
…
He bubbled up to the top, and boom–we did it! He did touch bottom on that jump, but only ever so slightly, and the riverbed in that area was really soft anyway.
It was my turn next, and I think given that we were focused so much on the depth of the water, we forgot to even really think much at all about the height above the river. Either that, or we were so used to it it didn’t seem high anymore.
I guess I forgot that important detail of our bridge-jumping preparations: the bridge railing that you could jump from, which we hadn’t jumped from yet, was 45 ft above the water. We jumped from the base of the bridge, which was probably about 42 ft.
Anyway, the water didn’t seem anywhere near as far away as it did it okatika gorge, but we did the exact same measuring test with the exact same rope as we used in hokitika, and this bridge was taller.
Well, I guess that’s not 100% true. The measurement of the hokitika gorge was done from the base and not the cables. At hokitika gorge, the first time we went, it was 43 1/2 ft from water to the base of the bridge where we were jumping off from. The last time we jumped to, I think it was probably at least 45 ft to the base, and then Chase jump from the cabling which added another 3 ft or so.
Anyway, that’s a long way of saying that basically to jump off the bridge was the same as the jump off the swing bridge and hokitika gorge. 😊
So yeah, the height was no longer concerned at all. I will concern was just informed, how we were jumping in order to land in water that we do was shower and hope that you could gorge, as we were able to touch the bottom.
After jumping from the base of the bridge, Chase climbed the railing was really windy, so it wasn’t easy to get up on the railing stand and then jump normally, so in order to do it, you had to basically jump the moment you got yourself up on the railing. You would commit to it beforehand, so to speak. So when he was ready, Chase quickly pulled himself to the top of the railing and jumped without any hesitation.
It was my turn next. I’ve tried to climb up on the railing to be able to do a nice steady jump, but I had the same problem that chase did. The railing wasn’t flat, and the wind was blowing hard, so when I pulled myself up, I lost my balance quickly and fell back onto the bridge.
So… I ended up doing exactly what Chase did: I committed to the jump ahead of time, pulled myself up, and jumped immediately.
Down, down, down I went, splashing harmlessly into the water below and excited that we had stuck it out and had been able to find a place to jump safely from the very top of the bridge at Rakaia Gorge.
😊🥳🎉🥳😊
There was a cyclist who watched us as we started experimenting on the south side of the bridge, and he stayed until we had successfully jumped from the top, using his high-end camera to snap lots of pictures which he said he will send us when he’s done with his cycling trip. 😊
But we did it!!! 🥳🎉🥳.
…
Oh, did I mention that the bridge was damaged? Sorry, I’m coming back to this post days later and haven’t read back through it. If I didn’t mention it, while Chase and I were scouting out different places to jump off the bridge, we noticed that some of the stabilizing straps, or whatever they are, on the bridge were snapped in half. Others of them were just super super loose.
After bidding farewell to our wonderful Rakaia Gorge bridge, I started googling to see if I could find the phone number of the agency that would be best to contact about the issue that we had found with the bridge. It took a little while, but finally I found a phone number that seemed relevant, called it, and made my report to the individual who answered the phone. He said I’d called the right number, ask me a bunch of questions, didn’t give me any grief for the fact that we had found it by crawling around the bridge looking for places to jump off the bridge into the water 🙃, and let me know that somebody might call me about it in the future.
We actually weren’t that far away from Christchurch at that point, and though I tried to find other things between where we were in Christchurch that we might do there on our last day, there wasn’t much that we were interested in. I did realize there was one place I wanted to visit that I apparently had forgotten to put on our visit map, but it was 2 hours back the other direction, so it wasn’t really realistic.
Instead, I found a beach north of Christ Church, and we headed up that way. Being my last day in new zealand, I wasn’t really in the mood to go get sticky in a cold ocean, so Chase and I just mostly sat on the beach, he mostly listening to music, and I eating a few peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and just sort of thinking.
We did have one last oh wow moment, quite apropos for the trip of a thousand wows. 🙂
As I was watching the waves roll in, the last wave would crash and make its way up the sand. But something happened several times that I’ve never seen happen anywhere on any beach in any place in the world that I’ve been to. I’ve never even heard of something like this happening.
Imagine standing on the sand looking out at the waves rolling in. You watch one from the time it rolls toward you way out into the water to the time the last remnants of it run up the beach and stop just short of your toes, before retreating back down the gently sloping beach into the next crashing wave.
Now picture that as the waves rolls in, curl, crash, flatten out and are pushed along, imagine what it would look like if a little torpedo, perhaps the size of a small can of hairspray (with a pointed cap), suddenly shot through the shallow water approaching you, from your left to your right, shooting water into the air 12+ inches high, like a mini sprinkler shooting the water straight up as it followed the torpedo.
Gosh, I don’t know how to describe it.
Or… Maybe picture how in movies sometimes they’ll have like this line of jet fuel going across the road and they ignite it, and the flame travels super quickly. Maybe picture that, but with water.
That’s what was happening over and over again. Sometimes slower sometimes really really quickly. It was wild. 😁
So cool.
Anyway, Chase and I stayed there for a while before it was time to do some last minute flight shopping, clean out the car a bit, and get myself packed for going home.
It was all so surreal. Here I was after 2 months of nearly non-stop go, go, go vacation, and now I’m heading home.
As I mentioned before, I was both ready to go home, and not ready at the same time.
Anyway, well we had been out on the beach, I was a bit concerned for where we left our car, as there was a couple in the truck parked next to us that it just kind of been hanging out in there. They were doing drugs, and I was a bit uncomfortable having them sitting in the parking lot next to our car knowing that we’re not there well we’re over a hill and down the other side on the beach, unable to see what’s going on with our car.
What ended up happening with that couple, however, was a heck of a lot funnier than it was dangerous for our stuff. 😆
Chase and I walked back from the beach, got in the car, and drove away. But we didn’t get very far, before Chase slowed the car to a stop, rolled down his window, and pulled a piece of paper off of our windshield that was between the windshield wipers and our windshield itself.
We both looked at the paper and busted up laughing.
That “couple” that I was worried about who were just hanging out in their truck doing drugs had left us the note, and it was a proposition–the woman wanting some men to… uh… spend time with in order to make her boyfriend jealous. Apparently, the guy she was with was gay, so he couldn’t… deliver.
😆
Chase and I laughed so hard. They left their phone numbers and said something like “we have a bong and horses and a river.”
That was the closing line of their sales pitch.
😆😆😆
Well, neither Chase nor I are interested in that kind of thing, so we just laughed a good bit as we drove away. 😆
From there, we drove over to a pizza place, where Chase ordered himself a pizza, and i made a mess of the road by pulling a bajillion things out of the car in order to clean up, and pack up for my impending return to arkansas.
So hard to be packing up to go. It wasn’t an easy trip for me by any stretch of the imagination. In a lot of ways, it was just a stressful as life at home, just different kinds of stress. But it was also absolutely fabulous.
I was rather melancholic as I went through all of my belongings, what I had brought with me, what I had bought while on the trip… I started making a pile of things to pass on to friends we were leaving behind. It just made sense to pass it along instead of trying to keep it or sell it. Let someone else enjoy it, and maybe they can pass it along to more people. Perhaps our little purchases here and there can benefit travelers for a good while to come.
Chase ate his pizza, and once I was all packed up, he drove me to the airport. I think it was around maybe 11:00 p.m. when we got there. I needed to be at the airport by like 3:00 in the morning, so I figured there wasn’t any reason for us both to lose a night’s sleep, so I figured I just sleep in the terminal once I got through security and everything.
Interestingly enough, I guess the airport isn’t busy enough to be open continuously, so the international wing of the airport was completely closed. So instead of going through security and then sleeping at the gate, I tried to sleep in the area where they do the rental cars. There was a nice sitting bench that didn’t have a back on it, so I was able to hook my arms and legs around my baggage, and then just try and sleep. And… that was it, my last day in New Zealand.
What an incredible trip, an incredible opportunity.
And 28 hours after my flight takes off, I will be back in Arkansas. But…. That’ll be written about in the next post. 🙂
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 