Bungee Jumping

The hostel that I'm staying at here has a tour that goes to some really big gorge in Beijing. I could attempt to impress people by actually remembering the name of the gorge, and then rattling off some historical information about it, but since I don't know either(and wikipedia is blocked), I'm not going to.

What's more important, was that I got to bungee jump for the first time. Bungee jumping for the first time in China seemed a little sketchy to me, the Chinese aren't known for their exacting safety standards, but it seemed really risky to me, which I think is a good enough reason to decide to do something.

After being weighed, I climbed up the tower in the picture above. Emptied all of the shit in my pockets into my backpack, then sat down to have the harness attached to my feet. The harness kind of reminded me of the those fuzzy sextoy handcuffs that attached to peoples beds, except for bigger, and tightend to the point that I couldn't feel my feet. After that I edged to the end of the platform, and realized that I didn't know what I was doing, this being my first jump and all. Nothing that couldn't be fixed by a short conversation with the bungee jump station staff I figured. The conversation went something like this -

Me: (gesturing and pointing down below on the edge of the platform, with a puzzled look on my face)

Chinese guy: You go!

After that, he pushed me off the platform, which was just as well, since I think I had reached the extent of his english language skills anyway. I heard laughter behind me for the first second or two, apparently because I was pushed off, and was ungracefully falling feet first, whereas most bungee jumpers dive. A half second later, the realization that I was falling really fucking fast hit me, my unconcious reaction to this was to wiggle my legs, my body searching for it's former companion, the ground.

After this, I got whiplashed like a mother fucker at the end, due to having to make the head over feet to feet over head transition at the end of the rope, which jostled me enough to forget any fear I had prior to this point. I got a nice round of applause from a boat full of korean tourists that was passing by underneath me in the river.

The next part of the jump was less exciting, but more painful, as I hung by my feet, with blood rushing into my head, over the river.

For this, I paid 10 US dollars, not bad.