Yes, it's boiling but that's because I'm back in Sydney! Basically, as some of you know, the first few days in Christchurch were a bit miserable for me. Despite spending four months complaining that I'd never get used to the heat in Australia, when I got to Christchurch it was a huge shock to be cold. Also, I'd spent two and a half months in Sydney and got a bit settled, so I felt sad to be leaving all that behind (homesick even). Dave suggested 'retail therapy' to cheer myself up but I can't get anymore stuff in my backpack so I decided that I'd come back to Sydney for my favourite bar's first birthday party. So I booked a ticket there and then.

Of course then Queenstown and the skydive happened, but I decided I'd still come back here as I really wanted to be there for the party.

I fly back to New Zealand early tomorrow morning, so I won't be having a late night tonight.

Now, I wasn't going to mention this because I didn't want to jinx it but I realised last night that I've probably told half of you about it individually already and I'm so excited about it that I tell anyone I talk to so I might as well let you all know. Apologies to those who already know about this: The reason I've recently been saying that my plans are a bit fluid at the moment is because when I get back to New Zealand I go to Rotorua where on Tuesday morning I start a course which, if all goes well, should teach me to skydive solo!

It's called the Accelerated Free Fall programme. It's nine stages (and nine jumps). I start off with about six hours of training on the ground before the first jump. I jump with two instructors but not attached to anyone. The instructors are on on either side and put you in the correct position and pull the rip-cord for you. You work your way up to jumping with just one instructor observing you and you do everything for yourself by the end of the course. You have to learn to maneuver and do a back flip! You free fall on every jump, apart from the last one where you jump from a fairly low altitude and deploy the chute straight away - like as if you had to do an emergency bail-out from the plane. That last one you do completely on your own.

If you fail a stage you have to re-do it (and pay for that stage again). Once you finish and pass the AFF programme you can jump solo. If I get that far then I'm planning to stay in New Zealand long enough to do sixteen solo jumps, at which point I should be able to get a New Zealand Parachute License, which is equivalent to the FAI (Federation Aeronautique Internationale) 'A' license which is internationally recongnised and lets you jump solo anywhere in the world.

I've thought a lot about doing this. It took me days after the tandem jump to be able to think about anything else. I've done a lot of research on the web and I've spoken to the guy at Rotorua who does the training. There are lots of places that do the AFF course but I'm doing it with NZONE. NZONE don't run the course at their Queenstown site, only at their site at Rotorua. It still scares me half to death but I really want to find out if I'm capable of doing this solo. With the tandem jump, once you get to the door you haven't really got a choice - your Jumpmaster is going and so are you! I've got to learn to jump out on my own and I really don't know if I can do it. I spoke to a guy in Queenstown who'd done a bungy jump and a skydive. He said he found the bungy harder because you have to make yourself jump off the edge.

It's cheaper for me to do this in New Zealand (although it's still not cheap by any means) than most other places. If I do the rest of my trip as I had planned and leave this until I get back to England I don't think it'll happen. Because of the extra time and money it is going to impact quite heavily on the rest of my trip. I think I'm looking at cutting out Fiji completely and it'll probably mean less time spent in the States as well.

Mind you, it might turn out that I just can't do it. I might find that jumping out on my own is just beyond my ability to cope with. Or it might be that after the first jump the instructors turn round and say that I haven't got the aptitude for it. Or I might find one of the stages (doing a back flip for example) is something I can't get the hang of. In that case I'll just go back to the trip more or less as planned.

I really want to do this 'though. I'm still so excited about it. I can still remember that dreadful/wonderful feeling of that first second as we fell out of the plane and the sheer terror and excitement of freefall. This whole trip was about doing new things. I knew I felt I was looking for "something" but I had no idea it might involve jumping out of perfectly good aeroplanes from 12,000 feet!

So there we are. I had no idea I'd ever consider doing something like this. I thought scuba diving on the reef and climbing the bridge where pretty amazing but if anyone had told me a couple of weeks ago that I'd be signed up on a Free Fall course I'd have told them they were mad. Originally I wasn't going to say anything about it until after I've done the stage one jump, at which point I should know if it's worth carrying on with the course. Then I was either going to say that I'd tried it and it wasn't for me or that I was carrying on with the rest of the course. I think there was some element of superstition that if I said what I wanted to do it wouldn't work out. But like I said earlier, I seem to have told a whole lot of people already and everyone I speak to gets to hear about it anyway - so if I'm going to jinx it it's already too late!

I get to Rotorua Monday afternoon and start the course at 9am Tuesday morning. I don't know when I do the first jump. I think the ground training takes about six hours and then it depends on the weather as to when we go up. I dare say there will be an email pretty shortly after that one way or another!

All the best,
Ian.