The powers that be: Corey Taylor and gravity

Because, mother, I know you are wondering, yes, my sickness is gone.

About forty percent of my body’s recovery I attribute to the human immune system.
But the other sixty belongs to Corey Taylor.
Corey has been one of my closer companions on the trip thus far. Her friendship has been one of the many unexpected blessings here in South Africa.
Incidentally, she is also a walking pharmacy.
As one of the twelve nursing majors on the trip this semester, she comes fully armed with an arsenal of antibiotics, vitamin C, and an insatiable impulse to care for anyone who has the slightest bit of congestion. In fact, all of the nursing majors with us in South Africa—about a month removed from any sort of clinical work—have all been more than eager to scratch a similar itch. Never in my life have I had so many of my peers so interested in the color of my phlegm—which, by the way was for some time a disconcerting shade of yellow-green.
All of this to say, I have been very well taken care of.
So rest assured, my dear mother.

And now for something that is sure to make you a little uneasy all over again:

Two days ago I jumped off the largest bridge in Africa.

Yes.
I went bungee jumping.
Not just any bungee jumping though—the tallest bungee jump in the entire world.

216 meters.
Or for those of you who don’t speak metric,
705 feet—over twice the length of a football field—
The equivalent of diving off a seventy-story building
And living to tell the tale.

The decision to do so was actually rather impulsive. It was Wednesday morning sometime, the first day of our journey from Cape Town to Pietermarizburg. As we neared our destination for the night, the option to bungee jump was presented to the group. Like most spontaneous activities on the trip thus far (such as shark diving and abseiling at Table Mountain), the bungee excursion promised to be a once in a lifetime experience, yet also sorely out of my price range. With transportation, estimated costs were just under R800 or—for those of you who also don’t speak South African currency—somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred American dollars.
Because I have a bit of a guilt complex when it comes to spending any amount of money on myself, and because the exchange rate inflates prices—however reasonable—to daunting figures, without much deliberation, I quickly resigned to the fact that bungee jumping simply was not in the cards for me.

But then I figured, what the hell.
I’ll play the hand anyways.

The next day we woke up early to a beautiful sunrise on the coastline. After an amazing breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, and coffee, about a dozen or so of us piled in a van and headed for the continent's tallest bridge.
The drive alone is worth telling of.
The stretch between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, better known as the Garden Route, might well be the most beautiful span of road that this world has to offer. With a mountainous, sun kissed forest—dare I even say jungle—on our left and a powerful shoreline on our right, we snaked our eastward along the coast, bound for the infamous Bloukrans Bridge.

Just driving over the bridge can be intimidating enough.
But jumping is an entirely different thing all together.

Feet laced together, you approach the edge of the bridge with the most reluctant and cautious of steps. With toes resting just beyond the cold, familiar concrete and your arms outstretched to each side, the countdown begins.

Five seconds.
Five short seconds.
Perhaps, the five shortest seconds of your life.

Five seconds to summon every ounce of courage—or rather, lunacy—in your body.
Five seconds to abandon every natural human impulse to remain on solid ground.
Five seconds to lose your mind.

And then.
Despite your legs’ stubborn protest, you do it.
You hurl yourself head long into an 800 foot deep gorge.

The freefall defies any sort of explanation.
Imagine if you will, the feeling your stomach gets when you miss the last step on a flight of stairs...
Got it?
Now imagine missing five thousand steps in a row.
That may give you some idea.

The fall of course was exhilarating.
There is no denying that.
But because the feeling was so indescribable, so incredibly foreign, and in many ways a blur altogether, I find recalling the jump with any sort of accuracy more or less impossible.
And it’s only been three days.
Rather, for me, it is the ninety seconds I spent suspended alone above the Bloukrans River that will forever be ingrained in my memory:

Above me, through the rich vegetation at the bottom of the gorge runs, walks—no, crawls—the Bloukrans River, the espresso colored author of the beautiful canyon. On one end, the gorge gives way to the sea. On the other, it winds its way uphill, to the river’s source—a beautiful mountain range dipping downward into an ominous sky. As I dangle by my feet, the rope slowly untwists, giving me a panoramic view of everything—the gorge, the mountains, the sea, the river, and the sky. Despite the building flow of blood to my head, I cannot help but be completely absorbed by my immense and beautiful surroundings.
And I feel remarkably at peace.
As my momentum yet again overcompensates for the rope, it untangles once more, treating me to the same wonderful panorama over and over and over again:
The sky, the sea, the creek, and the gorge.
From the mouth of the river
To the delta.
Again to the mouth.
And back again.

You know, the world does not seem quite so strange upside down.
If anything, it is all strangely fitting.
Somehow.