Christchurch, New Zealand

Past the cathedral... left at the Raj Mahal... straight over the roundabout... yes, it's nice to be back somewhere that I recognise. I shouldn't really be surprised, seeing that I have a flight in the morning out of here, and my circuit of the South Island is at an end. What was that? Did somebody say "bungy jump"?

A lot of you inferred from the conclusion to my last entry that I was contemplating doing a bungy jump - and you were nearly correct. What I actually did was go on a swing... very innocuous, you might think. There are some park swings in Queenstown, and I did have a go on them, but that was just to put me in training for my Big Jump: The Canyon Swing. Essentially, it's like those tyre-on-the-end-of-a-rope swings you'd put on a tree overhanging a pond. Except in this case, the tyre is a body harness, the tree is a platform at the top of a canyon, and the pond is a river 109m below... are you feeling queasy yet? I am just recalling it.

Actually, that analogy isn't quite right, because you don't start swinging right away. It's more like climbing to the top of the tree holding the tyre and then jumping off, falling some distance before you swing. By "some distance", there is a 60m freefall (taking 3 seconds) before you start swinging, by which time you're doing about 150km/h. For the noble cause of my dedicated readership, I wanted to film the enterprise, and so the team strapped my camera to my hand, and I leaped off prima-donna style with my camera hand outstretched. Screaming various remarks that I wouldn't repeat in civilised company (actually, anywhere except when falling to my death) I was winched back up with a huge grin on my face. "Let's have a look at the video", the guy said. At this point I went rather quiet, noticing that my camera was switched off.

"Better do it again, eh?" was his only remark. My legs are wobbling pretty violently at this point and my face is a little pale (so would you be if you just jumped into a canyon) but I fancied another go anyway, so I got hitched up again, and because variety is the spice of life, decided to jump off backwards this time. As you will see from the video when it appears on here in the next week or so, my blood well and truly curdled, and I am mildly ashamed to admit that I screamed like a girl. You'd think that the second time round it would be easier, but I found it the reverse. You see, no-one had told me about the freefall part of the jump beforehand, which does make it a whole different kettle of fish. My brain couldn't quite reconcile falling towards a certain death and not actually dying, but I did it, came out of it with a (watery) grin on my face and promptly went back to the hostel for a lie-down.

My wallet suitably dented, I left the next morning for the 6 hour bus ride back to the Garden City of Christchurch, where I am staying in the spiffing YHA hostel which was full last time I arrived. They even gave me a towel, which eliminates my usual check-out morning problem of a wet towel, as well as the rather unpleasant feeling of drying oneself with a chamois leather, which is what my high-tech towel does.

Anyway, I've had the weekend here in Christchurch, so on Saturday I headed out to Akaroa, the site of an aborted French settlement in New Zealand. It's mildly interesting, except that no-one speaks French there. But, nevertheless, it was a nice trip to the seaside on a nice warm Saturday...

That night, New Zealand came off Daylight Savings Time. The nights are drawing in... it's all colder from here on in, until next Friday when I return to the Northern Hemisphere. Ha ha!

Next stop, Auckland, the City of Sails! Well, they said this was a privatised country...