The 10-Hour Wait To Jump off A Bridge

So we heard that the biggest bungee jump in the entire world can be found on the southernmost tip of Africa, in Cape Town South Africa and we proceeded to head on down to Bloubergstrand. Well, as it turns out, it was a case of hurry up and wait — a full ten hours to have our turn, but as we understand it’s not really the norm.

On the day of our jump – we had fully paid up everything for the jump and there are no refunds, so we couldn’t just turn around and leave – it turns out that they had double-booked with a local insurance company which was filming a TV commercial. The ten hours flew by quite quickly I must say as we were basically standing in line with a nice mix of locals and travellers from all over the world, and the travel gods know a fellow traveller does indeed love a good travel story. Some of the locals told us they suspected the double-booking was on purpose because “in South Africa, these things happen all the time,” but there was nothing we could do at that particular point but wait in any case.

The wait was well worth it in the end as it made for quite the experience when we finally got our chance to try and kill ourselves by jumping off a bridge. We’d been told a scary story about a woman who’d actually survived having the bungee cord snap on her and falling into what was a crocodile infested river, however that was up north at the Zambezi River in the neighbouring Zimbabwe (Victoria Falls). Well, the woman is an Aussie as well, so was there ever any doubt that she’d survive something like that at all?

Anyway, we figured if it’s our time to die, it’ll happen somewhere, somehow, if it was to happen at that very point in time then what better way to go out than to do it jumping off a bridge?

We both made it out alive, which I’m pretty sure you can tell from the fact that this blog lives on, and we live to tell the story.

So it takes much longer than you’ll think because the instructors must brief each and every eager jumper on all the safety measures, a briefing which is made a lot less comfortable by the fact that you have to sign an indemnity form which basically just says that if you kill yourself, the event organisers aren’t responsible. If you want to have your friend there with you to offer some moral support before you take the plunge, they have to pay what’s called a friend’s fee, even if that friend isn’t going to be jumping herself, but would you have it any other way?

We both jumped this time around and we both had to pay the extra friend’s fee in order to balance out the scales and offer support to each other, but again I must say that it was all worth it. I’ve never felt more alive in my entire life and I still get the chills just thinking about that amazing day.