Extreme Day

NZ is famous for its extreme sports, bungee, zorb ball, skydiving, just to name a few. Rotorua is the practically the extreme capital of the north island, while Queenstown is the adventure capital of the south. We had seen zorb and bungee on a travel video by lonely planet but that does NOT prepare you for all the other opportunities you see; swoop, luge, agrojet, sky swing, freefall xtreme, shweeb, and then the skydiving, bungee and zorb. Since each adventure only lasts less than three minutes and they cost at least $35 NZ each, we, (Siena and I) were limited to three adventures each. Swoop and bungee were out of the picture quickly as Mom and Dad were scared to death of these two adventures. Zorb was a definite and so was the luge and freefall xtreme was nearly approved. The day after the three adventure pact was made, we headed out to Agro Adventures (Rotorua's home of bungee, agrojet, swoop, freefall xtreme and shweeb), to see which ones interested us. We were too light for bungee, to short for shweeb, but just perfect for all the others. We decided to do freefall xtreme.

Freefall xtreme = body flying. We went up onto a bouncy trampoline/platform with a humongous fan that would easily blow you away. And that's exactly what you want to do. We got into suits that allow much air to blow in and plastic goggles to protect our eyes. I had to crawl out onto the net covering the fan on my hands and knees. The fan started to pick up speed. Then one of the flight masters grabbed my feet and the other grabbed my hands and I started to go up to the net above. When I got there, they let go and I was flying!!! However, read the top paragraph again, specifically the three minute cost a lot for a little part. After 1.5 minutes, gravity had to take over.




Zorb = inflatable ball, just add yourself. There are two versions of Zorb, Zorbit and Zydro. In Zorbit you are strapped into the ball and sent head over heels down the hill. In Zydro, there is water inside the ball and you just get in, not strapped, to have a sloshy ride. Siena and I chose to go together down the straight hill, Zydro. We weren't tall enough to do Zorbit anyway. We started to go down facing the downside of the hill but that quickly changed. We must have hit a small bump because all of a sudden, we were jostled around and Siena's head was on my stomach. Not to mention that our backs were now facing downhill. Another quick (expensive) adrenalin rush was over, with soaking wet clothes.


Luge = alpine slide, just missing the track. For our last adventure, we headed up the closest mountainside on a gondola. No, not the 80 Euro ones in Venice but a SKY gondola, like the thing we took at Ocean Park in HK. Plus it's kinda hard to row up a mountainside. The Luge is an alpine slide type thing, like we did in Zakopane and Lake Bled. This one still had little carts that you control the speed, but in addition you also steer this one. Going down the mountain, you don't have a track but a road where you just try not to run into anybody. You have to do the scenic track first, to prove that you are a responsible driver. The scenic track is a 2k track running through a forest. It was very scenic!!! We rode the chairlift back up again and this time, Siena and Daddy went tandem on the scenic track, Mom went alone on the scenic track, and I went alone on the intermediate track. The intermediate track is shorter so I should have gotten down first, but when a fork in the road occurred and I made a decision that lead to a steep track with a drop, I had the trouble of getting to the other side of the fork were I felt more comfortable. When I finally arrived down, we rode the lift up once more to get the gondola to go down the mountainside to get to our car to go home.