Coronet Peak Tandem

Queenstown calls itself “the adventure capital of New Zealand”, and the options for throwing yourself out of or from high places are many and varied: bungy jumping, skydiving, paragliding, hang-gliding are the main ones. I decided to throw myself off a mountain…but taking the precaution of having a man strapped to me, and a parachute strapped to him.

We met up in town at the designated time, 10:45, and were driven to the top of Coronet Peak, the highest point in the city of Queenstown. We’d originally planned for Nicola to come along as well on photography duty, but it turns out that coming down from the mountain by parachute is quicker than the winding road by bus, so she’d’ve missed my descent and landing anyway. So I abandoned her in Queenstown and went off with three other customers. As we stepped into the bus we were weighed, to make sure we hadn’t been lying on our booking (there’s a maximum weight restriction), and allocated a pilot. We picked up our pilots halfway up the road to Coronet Peak and introduced ourselves. I was with René from Czechia.

We arrived at our jumping-off point, and it’s exactly that: there’s no building, just a patch of gravel with an astroturf runway downhill. The pilots readied themselves and us, strapping us in to our gear, then their gear, then finally attaching themselves to us. It was a cloudy day so we were looking for gaps in the cloud to make our take-off. The first one went and fluffed it a little (she stopped running before she left the ground), so I was strictly enjoined not to do the same thing, and keep running! A gap opened in the cloud, the other pilot shouted “Go!”, and I started running downhill on the strip. Before I’d gone less than ten metres we were off the ground, but I kept running for comic effect.

And that’s it! We’re airborne! René was controlling the wing, and we did a bit of swooping and turning. René was also taking pictures, pointing his GoPro selfie stick in all directions and getting all the angles. After a while he asked if I’d like to take control of the wing, got me holding both the handles, and then I did some turns, pulling down and releasing on his commands to execute 90° turns left and right.

 

Me on the controls

As we approached the landing field René did some big swoops, rollercoaster-ride style, before coming in fast, almost clipping the top of the grass, then pulling up to a stall. “Feet down!” he shouted, and I did so, and was standing on the grass. We’d been airborne for around 15 minutes and, as expected, the bus was still not here. So we unclipped, unharnessed, and René packed away his wing. We looked at the photos and transferred them to my phone, for a fee. After a short while, Julia turned up in the bus and we rode back into Queenstown, again dropping the pilots off halfway down.

All jolly good fun, exciting, and not even a little bit scary! Oo-er! I’ll probably do it again next time we’re in Queenstown.