Queenstown. City of extreme sports and insane stunts. Initially there was no mention of doing anything like bungy jumping but after hearing so many stories about the canyon swing Jasper managed to persuade me into booking a jump with them. We also decided to switch campsites the next day, seeing as the one we were in now was horribly overpriced, charged you for showers and everything closed at 11pm. After booking the canyon swing we stopped by an i-site to check out some more brochures and happened to run into one for a dive-shop in Queenstown. The dives were quite expensive so we were initially not planning to go, but I remembered nine mentioning them when we dived the Lermontov so we checked it out. Nine told us where to find them, just behind the supermarket, so rather than giving them a call we decided to just pay them a visit. Behind the supermarket were a bunch of modern office buildings with appartments on the 2nd floor, but nothing to indicate that there was a dive-shop there. Then we spotted a van with 'Dive Queenstown' written on the side and decided to see if there was anyone there. Eventually someone showed up, a bit surprised he asked us what we wanted. After verifying that this was the dive-shop we asked some questions about his dives. After he explained a few things he apologised for the fact that there was nobody there to meet us initially, but that he wasn't really a dive-shop and so wasn't used to people turning up at his place. We explained that Nine told us where to find him and this seemed to please him, he told us Nine was a good friend of him. After talking some more and after he showed us his gear and the dive scooters he used he offered to take us on 3 dives for the price of 2 because we were sent by Nine. We said we'd think about it and would give him a call later. After we walked out the door we talked about it "Do you want to do this?" "Yes." "Then let's just tell him right away, haha." So we turned back and booked the dives. He asked if we could do the scooter dive the day after, and even though we already planned to move campsites and do our canyon swing later on the day we figured we could probably squeeze the dive in the middle somewhere.
The next day we woke up early and packed up our tent, before heading to the other campsite we went to an outdoor shop to have our tent fixed. One of the zippers wasn't closing properly half of the time and it was really starting to annoy us, so we figured this was a good time to have it fixed. Rather than try to fix the zipper they just replaced the entire outer tent, which was nice.
We quickly moved our tent to the new campsite, had a shower and headed over to the dive shop (that wasn't actually a dive-shop). We (when I say we I mean Lance and his girlfriend Simone who run the place) loaded in the gear and headed off to the lake. Because he only had two scooters (and it would be too dangerous to escort two people on scooters) only one of us would dive at a time and after a game of rock-paper-scissors it was decided that jasper would go first.
About 40 minutes later Jasper and Lance resurfaced; Jasper seemed pretty excited and told me of the tricks he'd done and that they shot all the way down to 40 meters, the deepest we had ever gone. Then it was my turn. First we did a few excersises to get used to the system lance used, which was a little different from what we were used to, and after that Lance went back to pick up the underwater scooters. First we went down slowly so I could get used to the controls and the scooter and after that we started to descend quickly. Soon we stopped and Lance pointed at his computer, I looked at mine and saw that we were at 41.8 meters, eat that Jasper haha! We then slowly started to work our way up doing barrel rolls and all sorts of stuff along the way. Eventually Lance pointed at his computer again and I saw that it showed Deco, which meant that Lance had stayed down a little too long and too deep so he had to make an extra long safety stop to prevent decompression sickness. When we were doing our safety stop I looked at my air gauge and saw that I only had 10 bars of air left (which is virtually nothing) so I tapped Lance on the shoulder and signalled I was low on air. He looked at my gauge and when he saw how low I was he gave me his extra regulator to breathe from while we did our safety stop. When my 3 minutes were up Lance signalled for me to go up while he waited out the rest of his stop. When Lance was back on the surface as well I took off my gear and we discussed the dive a bit (Lance ended up on 30 bars, 50 bars is the usual ending pressure for a dive) and they dropped us off at our campsite so we could get ready for our canyon swing.

30 Minutes later we headed into town and I was really nervous. The jump was going to be a 60 meter freefall before the rope caught hold and swung you sideways. For more details see their website: http://www.canyonswing.co.nz/
They drove us up the mountain where they had their platform set-up. After they hoisted us in harnesses we got to jump off the edge one by one. The way in which you jumped depended entirely on you. I decided on "The Chair", meaning that they strapped me to some plastic lawn chairs and positioned me on the edge of the drop, backwards. I had to rock my chair back and forth until I finally fell backwards into the canyon. However, everytime I almost fell they grabbed the rope attached to me and pulled me back, and every time they did this they started making small talk again. After about 5 or 6 times I was ready to punch them in the face and my nerves were totally on edge. Then, finally, I leaned back again and slowly but surely fell off the platform, 60 meters down. After all the toying it was so unexpected that I totally forgot to scream as I flipped over and over on my way down. After they towed me back up and me and jasper checked our pictures we decided that $20 for a second jump was too cheap to turn down. For the second jump they suspended me head down, legs up facing the ground below me. Seconds after I got into position they unexpectedly let me go and I let out a loud scream as the ground came rushing towards me.
That night we were dead-tired, so it was fortunate that we had nothing planned for the next day.

Diving pictures:
http://s713.photobucket.com/albums/ww138/lingonlas/NZ%20maart%2011/

Preparation video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDGQR-fFe4U
http://s713.photobucket.com/albums/ww138/lingonlas/NZ%20maart%2011/