Niouc Suspension Bridge Bungy

Europe 2017 Blog Day 13

Hi everyone and hope you have been enjoying the blog so far. We had a really comfortable sleep last night in our Italian hotel despite the humidity, and it had rained during the night which had cleared the air nicely for when we got up this morning. We had picked this hotel as it had good reviews on Trip Advisor and had an excellent rating for the breakfast based on guest reviews. However we found that it only consisted of a croissant, a bread roll, a glass of orange and some coffee, which was fine but we were expecting a little more!

We set off from the hotel at 8:30am with lovely clear weather and hit the road with our destination being Niouc back in Switzerland. Unusually for Adrian who has everything planned to the last detail, he made a “spur of the moment” decision to try the car train rather than driving the mountain pass again as this would halve our journey time to get to the other side. We had no idea what we were doing but drove into the station where there didn’t appear to be a ticket office, but a guard beckoned us over and directed us to where we had to drive the car onto the train.

The journey time through the mountain tunnel was just 20 minutes, and we somehow arrived at the other side to cloud and rain? We still had a 1½ drive to Niouc and within a few miles down the road we were back to blue sky and sunshine - phew! More beautiful scenery and even more very high, tight bendy roads (Adrian’s nerves are shot!) and we arrived where we had our first glimpse of the Niouc Suspension Bridge (aka Spider Bridge) which I’m sure you can guess...I was going to Bungy Jump off. The bridge stands at 623ft high and couldn’t be in a more spectacular location. Adrian wasn’t jumping but he had planned to join me on the bridge as a spectator (for 5 Swiss Francs) to video my jump close up, and maybe even do a 360° tour on the bridge with his professional camera and tripod which we had bought with him, but having wandered down to the bridge entrance, lost his nerve and decided he couldn’t even walk on the bridge so would just film my jump from the side instead and not do the tour!

The bridge is very narrow and is only wide enough for one person to walk down, and the walkway is made up of wooden slats which creak underneath your feet as you walk over them. The bridge is quite bendy, bounces as you walk and you feel really exposed especially as it’s quite breezy at that height, so just the trip over to the jump platform is a white knuckle experience in itself. There was only one jumper ahead of me so only had to wait about 10 minutes whilst he did his jump...then it was my turn. WOW ... another amazing jump with a huge freefall and 1st rebound, and loved every second of it. This was the only activity we had planned for today and were due to head for our next hotel back in Italy afterwards, but Adrian had another change of plan so I’ll pass you over to him:

(Adrian): I don’t know if it’s the heat, the intense mountain single-track hairpin bends that go on for miles with sheer drops or just the frequency of extreme activities but yesterday, when we arrived at the dam, my nerves were shot to pieces. I watched numerous jumps and kept telling myself I had done one higher in Macau a few years ago, but in the end, couldn’t bring myself to doing something we had paid a lot of money for but I may not enjoy, so happily gave my jump to Ian so it didn’t go to waste.

Last night, I went over all the day’s events and talked over everything with Ian. In the end, I decided I would be very disappointed with myself having been there and not done it and getting home full of regrets. So I worked out if we could get from Niouc back to Verzasca in the same day and, with a tail wind behind us, we got there just before closing and I did it! I won’t say it was easy, but it was worth every mile and hour out of our way to get back there. Would I do the dam again? Of course I would, in a heartbeat. Now, about those single track roads....

Just to advise, we are in 2 parks tomorrow until 11pm, so the final day’s blog won’t be available until Tuesday evening, therefore we would like to wish Linda Happy Birthday for Monday 26th.

 

---