Flying High and Diving Low in April

Needless to say, it’s been a minute. I have been on some spectacular adventures as of late, and frankly have not thought about writing practically at all. I’ve really come to terms with and settled with the idea of this semester not being one of immense, outward personal growth and realizations, and having not all that much interesting to say. I’ve also been reading some of my favorite creative nonfiction recently, namely Pam Houston’s A Little Bit More About Me, and recently found myself in an absolute dream scenario of being on a bike in between two friends debating the merits of her nature writing, and whether she is a person who is influenced by the outdoors because of what her experiences there teach her, or if she is someone who goes to the outdoors to work through pre-existing issues. This led me to think about my own writing here, and the fact that, most of the time particularly in this country, I don’t have particularly stunning conclusions about my time in the outdoors, and most of these essays have followed a similar pattern of listing the events of my trips without much of a conclusion beyond “I love my life and my friends, I’m happy to be here, I’ve very grateful”, which is really not a reinvention of the literary wheel and I don’t know how necessary it feels, especially compared to the vital writing of my experiences last semester and during my gap year to work through and understand them. Things just aren’t so complicated now, and maybe that means they don’t need to be written down with nearly as much detail. I know I could be writing more interesting posts that encapsulate other distinct things about my experience here, but they just haven’t materialized, for better or worse. I don’t know how all this will change my last few weeks of writing in New Zealand, but it’s something I’m thinking about. 

So, onto the adventures. I had basically the entire month of April off, from the 5th to the 27th, for my fall break and Easter holidays. For the first week of that, I road tripped around the South Island with my parents, seeing many of the sights Tiger and I saw and some new ones, including Stewart Island. I loved showing them around this place that has brought me so much joy these past few months, and they loved the South Island just as much as I do.

And, most thrillingly, my mom and I went sky diving! It was incredibly epic, and not nearly as frightening as I expected. We originally hoped to skydive out of Queenstown, but after our trip was cancelled due to high winds, which led to a wonderful pivot day walking around Queenstown and sitting in the sunshine, we decided to make a booking on our way through Aoraki/Mt. Cook National Park a few days later. We expected to do a 12,000 foot jump, with around a minute of freefall, but when we arrived we learned we were actually jumping from 16,500 feet, which required oxygen while on the plane. All excited energy, we awaited our time, met the team, suited up in our awesome jumpsuits, and soon were heading up. The flight was spectacular, small looping circles above the farmland of the Mackenzie country, with views of Aoraki, the lakes, layer after layer of the Southern Alps stretching away from us, and even views of both coasts.

About halfway up, my designated cameraman handed me an oxygen mask, at which point I thought “oh great, this is a nightmare flight. First someone is giving me oxygen, then I’m going to jump out of this plane? This is nuts”. My only moment of real fear was when they opened the door and I realized I really was about to jump out of a plane. Our third companion, who had skydived before, was the first to go, and within about five seconds my mom was gone and I found myself dangling over the edge, feet freely waving in the wind, staring down at the earth. It was a truly wild feeling which didn’t linger long, because soon we had shoved off and were in freefall. The feeling of freefall is truly impossible to describe. It felt like cliff jumping sort of, but multiplied by a thousand, and without any of the fear of going splat. We were flying, or really plummeting, and I could not stop smiling. My friend Frances told me that the feeling of freefall goes away after a couple of seconds, that stomach dropping sense of the world having fallen away, and I sort of agree, as nuts as that sounds.

After closer to a minute and a half of falling, my person pulled the parachute, and the feeling completely shifted, such that we were upright and floating. I felt my only real nausea during this stage, as she would swing us around a bit and my body caught up to the fact that I was moving around in the air, high above the earth. We only floated the final 4,000 feet or so, and then much too soon we were back on the ground, skidding to a stop in a patch of green grass. After a huge hug with my mom and more endless smiles, we shuttled back to the flight center. There, we sat in the sunshine and read our books, waiting for my dad’s return from his helicopter flight up to a glacier, and watched other people fly, jump, and shuttle back. It was truly a magical experience, and the three of us were euphoric all day from our time up high. After, we hiked the Hooker Valley Track, for my money the most beautiful 10km hike in the world, which was serendipitous as one of the bridges that is critical to the track is now permanently closed until late 2026. We swam in bone-chilling glacial water (with icebergs floating between us) and hiked back to beat the light. It was a tremendous day and an experience I’ll never forget.

My other huge high of my near-month off was scuba diving the Great Barrier Reef. The GBR has been on my bucket list for as long as I can remember, since I was tall enough to paste cut-out Nat Geo kids pictures of sea turtles to my bedroom door and know that I loved being in the water more than anything else. When I learned about my ridiculously long break, I knew this was going to be my shot to explore Australia, and more importantly make it to the reef. When my aunt Katie and her partner Matt said they would love to come visit a friend in Cairns and then me on the South Island, I was overjoyed to have buddies to do it with, and my break shaped up around these two family-oriented events of a week with my parents, a week in between, and a week in Cairns. 

Our time in Cairns was absolutely delightful. I ate some of the best food of my time in the southern hemisphere, loved hiking in the oldest rainforest in the world, and really enjoyed catching up with them. The star of the show, however, was no doubt the reef. We ended up spending three days there, first on a daytrip with a cultural immersion-focused guiding company, then two days on a liveaboard sailboat with a different company. I dove 8 times on the reef, which practically doubled the number of dives I’ve ever done, and I found each one to be incredibly unique and so, so special. 

I’ve written before about the feeling of scuba diving itself, the weightless sensation of being fully submerged and in control, how incredible it feels to be among the fish rather than an outsider looking in, how peaceful I find the experience. Diving the GBR included all of this but with unparalleled reefs themselves, including the biggest fish I’ve ever seen in my life and a truly breathtaking amount of biodiversity among the types of coral and fish themselves. I saw many of my old friends from Ushongo, who will always hold the monikers Ryan and I gave them– blue helper fish and half-and-half-cookie fish were both ever present during my dives. I got to see the most incredible coral formations, including huge canyons big enough to swim through, huge pinnacles that looked identical to the cityscape of Finding Nemo, and more colors than I could possibly name. 

During our liveaboard, I had the opportunity to nightdive, something I was never all that interested in before this experience, but now recognize as no doubt one of the most unique things I have ever done. After dinner, and two exhilarating dives during the day, we all suited back up into our stinger suits and full dive kits, but this time with flashlights strapped to our shoulders. The minute I entered the water I knew I wasn’t going to be afraid at all, with there being so many of us and so much light from our flashlights, and I realized that it was going to be an incredible experience. The boat had lights turned on pointing downwards which caused many of the giant predator fish to swarm to catch the bugs which were attracted to the light and sitting on the water, so we had spent dinner watching them all jump and dive. Now I was in the water beneath them, looking up at these giants compete in the spotlight. Down we went, following the boat’s mooring line until we reached the same site we had dived during the day, now completely transformed. My sense of space was totally different compared to the day, and I had the feeling that I wasn’t swimming at all, but instead walking around playing manhunt with a flashlight in my hand. We saw sharks and more gigantic fish, which weren’t afraid of us at all and some even used our lights to help them hunt. It was otherworldly, this sapped-of-color coral scape with massive monsters slowly flicking their way through the structures. I absolutely loved it, and never wanted it to end. 

The next day, we had a few more dives, and in between each one I would take a swig of water and immediately jump back into the water to go snorkeling, not wanting to waste a second of my time there. It was the end of the trip when I jumped in for one more lookabout. By this point, I had seen everything I wanted and more– manta rays shuffling around in the sand, reef sharks swinging around our group, huge schools opening and closing around me and more, but I hadn’t seen a sea turtle yet. I tried to keep my heart open and full of the things I had seen, and recognized that this trip had been a dream come true, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t just a little bit disappointed. Other members of the group had seen them and followed them around for minutes at a time, no one else on the reef but them, just watching them move about in their stoner fashion and sip air every once in a while. 

Just as I was about to turn in, feeling incredibly grateful and deeply sad to be leaving, I felt a tap on my shoulder. One of our boatmates was pointing vigorously to our right, and there it was: a gorgeous, slow moving, brightly patterned sea turtle, just dancing its way around us. It got within three feet of Matt before sipping a mouthful of air, practically bumping into him. As it turned away from the group I followed, staying a couple dozen feet behind it and just observing, the way it gracefully banked and slid around and between coral structures, making its way into a sand-filled canyon and sliding its way up to the surface. I was truly transfixed. I think it was probably the most beautiful living creature I have ever seen, and I was practically brought to tears that I was so close to this animal I had thought so much about throughout my life, and one which I wondered if I’d ever get to see one day. In a familiar feeling to much of this year, I felt so incredibly grateful for every decision that brought me to that moment, swimming alongside a sea turtle on the most magnificent reef in the world. It was magic. 

Sailing back to Cairns that afternoon, I spent a long while thinking about the other experiences in life through which I am likely to feel the same amount of euphoria. Seeing the Northern Lights, probably, and the first time I ever get behind a team of dogs, I think, but there are very few dreams with such bone-deep significance as this one for me. How unbelievable that I have been able to live these dreams out this year, among the dozens of dreams I didn’t even know I had. And how beautiful to get to sit on a sailboat on a sunny day, thousands of miles from home, and feel perfectly content in the many things my heart and mind have been full of recently. 

A third, unexpected joy of my time in Australia was seeing the Sydney Opera House. This joy is less explicable to me than the other two highlights, in that I don’t tend to be one for famous architecture, and I usually prefer my beautiful sights less-peopled, but the Opera House really stopped me in my tracks. I think this is for a number of reasons– for one, the Opera House was the first place I went when the solo portion of my Australia trip started, and the feeling of being by myself, navigating a city on the other side of the world, was pretty euphoric, and something I really missed. Second, the Opera House itself is inarguably stunning and incredibly unique. Lastly, and I’d argue most importantly, the Opera House is famously known for being extremely far away from my home. 

There have been moments, and places this year where I feel like I’ve really taken stock, places that feel like a waypoint on my compass, places I could only have navigated to this specific way, places which make me consider the shape of it all. Places that inspire a moment of reflection, usually written, and a rush of gratitude. Ushongo, the Serengeti, Milford Sound, the Great Barrier Reef, and Kilimanjaro, to name a few. Weirdly enough, the Opera House was one of them. I wrote the following in my journal: 

For some inexplicable reason, I really never in my life thought I would see this place. It’s not that it’s so magnificent (if anything it’s a little underwhelming) but it always felt worlds away, unimaginable and impossible and one of those places I thought I’d probably never stumble into. Not on any bucket list, no particular need or goal of mine to see it, but omnipresent nonetheless, somehow. A place I knew of and thought of and saw from afar without ever really considering it as a place I could and would go. 

And now, here I am. 22, in a foreign city, alone, very far from home, with few plans and a few dollars, journaling by the waterside in the bright, ozone-less sun. I have learned so many things. I have brought myself so far to be right here, soaking this all in in its entirety. 

I have climbed mountains taller than I can fathom, crossed wide streams of cold glacier blue, seen animals whose names I cannot pronounce, navigated public transit in languages not my own, overcome tall waves in small boats, bounced over rivers in big cars, but it is perhaps this most of all that might stun my younger self, if only because it is a place she could understand more than all the rest of it.

I have made it, far from home, with miles to spare and sights to see. A thousand, a million things to see and have seen, waterfronts to journal by, and for now I’m grateful, shocked, and amazed to be at this one. 

There were many other highs during my month of travel, but these moments were particularly unforgettable. How lucky I am to have gotten to share these experiences with people I love. May there be many more like them, and if not, I’m pretty darn full up anyways.