A Great Leap of Faith – Skydiving

So jumping out of a plane has always featured on your bucketlist – what do you do? There are so many options now with all kinds of ways you can skydive or parachute.

You don't have to do it solo. You can go tandem with an instructor and can choose how long you want to freefall when you jump depending on how high the plane's flying. Tandem skydiving from 12,000 feet takes approximately five minutes of your life from the moment you step out of the plane. The panoramic views you get on the way evidently stay with you for the rest of your life so it's worth thinking about where you want to skydive if you are only planning on doing it once.

Skydiving operators are based in many tourist hot spots including Paihia in the Bay of Islands to Auckland and Rotorua, Lake Taupo, Nelson and Canterbury down to Lake Wanaka and Queenstown. Heights to jump from seem to vary from 8,000 feet to more than double that depending on whether you are going to go tandem or solo and the surrounding landscape.

If you are an adrenalin junkie, there are skydiving operators that offer up to 75 seconds of accelerated freefall at 200km an hour from 16,500 feet.

Sometimes companies stipulate a weight limit of 100kg so it's worth researching on the net and making some phone calls to check this and find out if there is anything else you need to know.

If taking that one step out of the plane is a bit too much for your mind to handle, you can even skydive now without going up in a plane. An experience called Freefall Extreme based in Rotorua gives you the opportunity to fly unattached on a giant wind column with speeds up to 220km.