A Thing I Had Not Done Before

Looking back to February 2016 (nothing much seems to have happened in January):

I wrote recently here about things I hadn't done in a year, which was to say, mostly, things I used to do routinely in the USA and haven't done at all in Namibia.  Like traveling on trains, planes and in my own automobile.  At first I wrote that I hadn't been in an airplane since April 2015, but then I remembered that I have.  I have!  The thing is, the two airplances in which I've flown were more like golf carts with wings than the jets and regional jets of most of my air travel.

That's because I've been skydiving.

Birthday girl second from left.

It started in January, when J. wrote to say that she wanted to celebrate her birthday by skydiving, and did I want to come.  Sure, I said.  Love too.  Birthdays are important, and skydiving in Swakopmund is a popular activity with us PCVs, who knows why, but it might be fun.

So five of us gathered one Friday evening at the Municipal Bungalows in Swakop, and had a fun tourist-town evening with fancy food and dancing and a broken lock on the bungalow and a guy breaking in after midnight and no one realizing that it was some strange guy and not one of us five women being unusually discourteous and clumsy until he was halfway up the stairs to the bedroom, and then I leapt up and shouted, "Get the [deleted] out!" and T. sat up and screamed and the guy stumbled down the stairs and I did, too (really steep, slippery wooden stairs and me without my glasses), in time to see C. come out of the downstairs bedroom shouting (and she's smoked for years and sounds scary and authoritative, and does not delete her expletives), and A. wander out of the bathroom waving a toothbrush in consternation.  The guy ran out the front entrance of the campground, past the security guard watching TV with headphones.  Then a few of our group went over to the office to demand a working-lock bungalow, and I went back upstairs to decide whether I should put on pants or go back to bed.

Full story on request, but don't ever stay at the Municipal Bungalows.  Security was heinous - non-existent, really - and customer service in the aftermath almost as bad.

View's all right, though, at times.

Eventually (cf: security and customer service above) we piled all the furniture in front of the door and went back to pretend to sleep while hissing at each other about the scary intruder.

The next morning, Martin from Ground Rush arrived more-or-less on time to collect us, with a guy who didn't introduce himself and kept making obscurely cavalier remarks about skydiving.  He seems to have been a hobby skydiver who was just hitching a ride to the drop zone in the company vehicle.  First stop was the office, where we signed waivers and proffered credit cards, and then it was out to the drop zone, just a few kilometers east and a bit north of Swakop, generally out of the fog/mist/cloud zone.  There were two sheds, a toilet, a bit of tarmac, no potable water and some picnic tables on two small spots of carefully-cultivated lawn grass.  And wifi, but I'm not sure anyone used it.

We got a brief introduction from Frank, who requested we not hold the sides of the wide-open airplane door when our tandem partners or jumpmasters or whatever they're called wriggled us over to the edge.  Some people, he explained, get nervous at the last minute and generate so much adrenalin or whatever it is that their grips on the door edges become almost unbreakable, and they don't have enough leeway in the flight pattern to allow for patient waggling of each of ten fingers loose from the frame.

It was sunny in the morning, but by the time I jumped the cloud cover was thick.
Uusually Swakop goes the other way: misty mornings and clear afternoons.

Then we sat at the table and waited.  Many hours.  Many, many hours.  I was a bit concerned about how my digestive system might react to freefall, so I elected not to eat or drink that morning, and stuck to it as morning ceded to afternoon.  Instead I chatted with a lovely young woman from Windhoek who was there with her boyfriend.  They went up about mid-day, and came plunging gracefully down, and she landed first, and was so excited I threw my arms wide and we hugged gleefully.  Then her boyfriend landed, and she raced to him, saying, "Wasn't it great!?  I can't wait to do it again!!"  He stared at her like she was a crazy person he'd never met before.  Different strokes, right?

About 3pm, rather hungry, I started to suit up.

All four of my friends went up before I did, and each of them loved it.  One screamed as she dove, trying to wake a dear friend who had recently suffered a stroke 10,000 kilometers away.  Then it was my turn.  Jack had provided me with a purple jumpsuit, and a harness, and checked all my straps carefully.  Checks complete, we walked out to the plane and everyone made thumbs-up gestures to each other.  At about 5,000 feet -- skydiving around the world is done in feet, even though almost everywhere is metric -- one of the guys jumped out, and we watched him fall away into the overcast sky.  At around 10,000 feet, another guy edged up to the door, looked at me and said, "Push me."  "Really?" I asked, and he nodded, so I reached over and shoved his shoulder, pretty gently, and out the door he went.  That was Matheus, I believe, and that was enormously fun.  I want to do it again.

Ready to push a stranger out of a plane.

Then Jack told me to sit on his lap, and I listened to buckles clicking into place, and I crossed my arms over my chest and he wriggled up to the door, and I said, "Perfect track record, right?" and he said, "Right," and I said, "Wouldn't want to mess it up now," and he chuckled and rolled us out the door.  I uncrossed my arms and let them fly out and back, and let the wind fling my feet into the proper position, and looked at the world all spread out in the almost-gloaming below me.

Swakop is known for this heavy cloud cover that can stop abruptly
a few kilometers from the coastline.

We plunged down, the plane vanished above us, Jack kept pointing to the videographer when I wanted to look at the ocean, and very soon there was a loud noise and a strap slammed into my neck and my whole body jerked abruptly upward.  Well, probably not, but that's how it felt.  Then I started to feel slightly nauseated, and when Jack handed me the controls I very gently steered us, slowly, left and right and slowed us down a bit and then right some more, but was mostly content just to drift, chatting casually with Jack and breathing through the nausea, which I think was a function of not eating more than skydiving.



The pink splotches by the sea are salt pans. And this is another odd cloud pattern
for Swakop; usually they're thick over the ocean and end abruptly slightly inland.

And Jack took back the control straps, and soon I could see little people waving to us, and then we came in a RUSH onto the ground, and I held up my feet as instructed and we landed gentle as thistledowns, or maybe not quite.  Big hug to Jack, high fives to friends, and about two liters of water straight down the gullet and strongly recommended we get ourselves some SANDWICHES somewhere!  Which we did, and then everyone napped and we went out to hear some music and met a couple of the skydivers at the pub and they took three of us to a couple of dance clubs and to their flat, and then a pilot drove us back to the Bad Bungalows at 5:00am.  So that was fun, too.

The parachute is called a 'canopy', and this one is very lovely.

But I didn't have nearly as much fun with the actual diving as my friends did, and wasn't sure if it was lack of vital nutrients and, frankly, maybe a touch of something headed toward dehydration, or if I really didn't like it.  So I decided to try it again, which I did in June.  [cliffhanger!]