Mission Beach

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Arrived in Mission Beach Wednesday afternoon, chilled out for a couple of hours, and booked some stuff for Cairns and then watched a film in the evening. On Thursday morning we went white water rafting!! It was such good fun. We did up to grade 4 rapids and got nice and soaked. We had a chance to float along the river too, outside of the raft, which was pretty cool. We had 2 French guys in our raft and a French instructor so they kept speaking French all the bloody time!! Luckily we also had the river medic in our boat (and even more luckily didn't need him!!) who was Australian, so there was someone speaking English to us, and he was a really funny guy, he decied he couldn't say Anwen so nicknamed her "Annie" and nicknamed me "Knickers!" haha! We had BBQ lunch half way through the day and then did some more rafting. We saw one other boat completely capsize and that looked pretty rough, so glad it wasn't us! We also kidnapped some people from another boat for splashing us, our guide just dragged them on board!! Haha. We stopped the rafts at one point and did rock jumping, where we jumped off a rock 5 metres above the water into the river. It got pretty cold after we were wet so was nice to get back and have a hot shower and a couple of ciders!

On Friday morning a bus picked me up at 7am from our Hostel Scotty's and took me to the sky diving centre where I filled in form and got geared up to do a sky dive!!! We were each paired when a guy working there who would look after us and jump with us, he put me into my harness and then we drove to the airport. Up in the plane the instructor attached me to him. There were a lot of straps and he did them all up really tight so I didn't feel like I'd be going anywhere! When we got to 14,000 feet a red light came on and we had to put our eye masks on, when the amber light lit up we held on to the harness straps and on green shuffled towards the door of the plane. I had to telt my head back and arch my back. I was the 5th person out of the plane but it all happened really fast. There was no time to think about it, I just sat on the edge and then we were falling!!! It was great that I didn't have to make the decision of when to jump myself and the instructor just pushed me out! Free falling was incredible!!!! It was such a rush!! The wind blowing right in my face (really loudly!!) and soaring to the ground! The free fall lasted about 60 seconds but it didn't even feel like long. I could feel the wind in my mouth blowing my cheeks out and we spun around a few times which was so much fun! I can honestly say I wasn't even that scared! I haven't been at any point really, in the run up to it I wasn't really thinking about it, in the plane I got a little bit nervous but I just focused on the beautiful views below and my guy was telling me what all the things we could see were. We jumped over the ocean and landed on the beach. I saw the rainforest and the beach and the sea, it was a pretty spectacular view. When he pulled the parachute we rose back up into the air a little, before sailing back down. I did feel relieved that the parachute opened with no complications 😊 and we took about 3 minutes to get down to landing. I had to lift my legs up to land and we had quite a smooth landing. It was all over very quickly but it was amazing!!! Can't believe how calm I was and I loved it.....would definitely do it again if it wasn't so expensive!! Ha!! I got a free t-shit saying "Australia's highest sky dive Mission Beach" so as far as sky diving is concerned I can now officially say, been there, done that, got the t-shirt!!! :D

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