The NZ One
Just another embarrassing encounter from ‘Sam’s Life as a Movie’, as many strange and wonderful things tend to happen to me, much to my friends’ amusement.
Recently, I travelled around New Zealand (which was INCREDIBLE and a must do—check out my Instagram to see photos), and this story is the standout moment of my trip.
So, I drove to Queenstown and checked into my hostel. As soon as we got there (my brother and I were travelling together) we asked reception about possibly going hang gliding. They lady called the hang gliding company and it turned out that they had a shuttle picking people up from the hostel in five minutes—did we want to go? Yep.
So we quickly raced to our room, dumped our bags, I took my motion sickness medication (for I get sick on anything that moves) and then ran back to reception and paid. We were then picked up by the shuttle. I happened to notice that one of the pilots was, to put it mildly, gorgeous.
So we got to the top of Coronet Peak and the pilots picked who they wanted to tandem with. Hot guy picked me! I was so excited. But then, he put me in this weird harness and started telling me, “Okay, so we’ll run off the edge of this cliff and then the parachute will lift us up, you then lean back into me and basically sit on my lap for the flight.”
← Me.
The most important part of that conversation was lost on me. Until he started taking a PARACHUTE out of a bag. I asked why we needed a parachute when we were hang gliding.
He looked at me like this:
Turns out, they screwed up our booking and put us down for paragliding instead of hang gliding. And all flights on the following day had been cancelled due to rain and high winds, and there were also no more hang gliding pilots or gear for the day we were there. We either got a refund or went paragliding.
I looked into my pilots very blue eyes and remembered him saying that I got to sit in his lap for the fifteen minute flight.
Was a no brainer, really.
Anyway, I got strapped in and we took off, and it was SO boring. Beautiful, but basically a float down a hill. I wanted a rush! I wanted to feel like I was actually flying! I got to hold my pilots biceps and help him steer so it was all okay!
BUT. But.
About one minute in I felt the stirrings of nausea. Bloody, bloody hell. Motion sickness. My tablets had forsaken me!
“Hey, how about we do some awesome manoeuvres so it feels like you’re on a roller coaster? I think you’ll love it.”
“Yeah, sure, I love roller coasters!”
So then he did this awesome, fast, spin-drop thing, which made the flight a hell of a lot more fun, but my BLT from lunch did not concur. I was going to be sick. I was 600m above ground, sitting on my hot pilots lap and I was going to spew.
I asked if he could please stop with the twirling at exponential speed, because I wasn’t feeling great. He did, and reassured me by saying it was quite common, but to try as hard as I could to hold it in. So, feeling like death, we descended and then landed. As soon as my feet hit the ground—while I was still tightly strapped to my pilot—I bent over (which, consequently meant that he was forced to bend over the top of me, like we were bloody going at it standing up) and proceeded to retch my guts up.
He managed to unclip me some time later, pointed to the toilets, where I ran and spewed some more. After I emerged, feeling like dying would be a blessing, he came over and asked how I was. Putting more than three or four words together was beyond my cognition at this point, and I also had vomit breath. So, obviously feeling bad for me, he gave me a discount on the photos and video!
I suck at life!