New Zealand is known for its adventure tourism, so I decided that my stay here would not be complete without at least one of these crazy adventures. And since I had really wanted to go skydiving for a long time that’s what I went with. I decided on Taupo, due to its nice location at a lake shore and also its relative affordability compared to other places around the country (it was by no means cheap though…).
Less than ten minutes after I had made the call I was picked up and taken to the airfield – in a stretch-Hummer (Not at all my style; but ok…).
About half an hour later I sat in a small plane, strapped to Toby, a professional skydiver, and we were making our way up to 12,000ft; jumping elevation. I did not feel nervous, surprisingly, but very eager to dive into this new experience.
Toby maneuvered us to the open hatch in the back, and off we went! 
Because of the speed of the plane we reached maximum velocity about five seconds after exiting, and we were hurtling towards the ground until Toby stabilized the fall. It was literally breathtaking: The airflow was immense and entered my open mouth like a jet, which weirdly enough made it really difficult to breathe. But when I got accustomed to that new feeling I started to wildly enjoy the unparalleled sensation of this fall. The 40 or so seconds of free fall stopped abruptly though when the parachute opened: We were yanked upward (or so it felt), until we had slowed down enough to calmly glide over the tiny houses, roads and the lake below us.
We did some spinning and turning around, also to appreciate the scene, and then landed spot-on in the landing area. WOW! I still felt exhilarated and would have liked nothing more than to hop right back onto that yellow plane for another ride…
I did not book any of the numerous photo-options (which would have almost doubled the cost of the jump!) but two other people in my group did. Taupo Tandem Skydiving was nice enough to edit and upload a video of their jumps, and I am featured in it ;-) Feel free to check it out, it gives a good impression of what the jump looked like!
