Day 9: Queenstown Action day! This morning I jumped off a mountain. Fortunately, I was attached to Shayne, who was in turn attached to a parachute of sorts. The takeoff was from a point above the snow line, so that I had to do a kind of careful duck-waddle for take-off to avoid slipping. We paraglided for about ten minutes, did a few probably tame but to me thrilling aerobatics, then landed in the field distantly adjacent to the one in which my acrophobic personal photographer was standing, poised to capture the graceful landing. She missed it, but this worked out OK on two counts: first, my landing was decidedly ungraceful, and second, my paragliding host had a camera on the end of a boom that captured wonderfully the essence of our flight. The whole thing
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