One Heck Of A Ride

205 The South Pacific jet boat rides and bungee jumps when someone said my jump had been added to the tape, and I got Mike to promise he wouldn’t tell my wife or the others what I’d done. After dinner, when everyone had gathered in front of the television, the video player was turned on. It wasn’t long before the tape started showing what appeared to be a commercial for jet boat tours. When the tape switched to bungee jumping, I heard Marty say, “That’s Bill Paulin up there!” “I knew you were crazy, but now I’ve got the proof,” were her next words. A Bad Start To A Great Vacation After the great time Marty and I had in New Zealand, we decided to return to the South Pacific for a vacation in 2007 and to see some of Australia’s best-known sites. The way it began I was convinced it would prove to be a vacation in hell. A tropical storm diverted our flight to Cairns and forced us to land at a secured military base in New Zealand and wait for better weather. When it cleared a bit, our plane lifted off, flew around, and then landed again. The pilot announced that we would have to wait for a new crew to arrive because ours had worked the maximum hours allowed. We were not allowed to leave the plane. We’d been on it for twelve hours. After sixteen hours on that plane, the food was gone, the toilets were full, the drinking water was almost gone, and we were stuck on the tarmac. The crew gave us tiny cups of water to sip and opened the doors to let us smell fresh air while we waited another four hours before the weather cleared and we were able to fly to Auckland, where the airline arranged hotel rooms for everyone for the night. My friend Chris Ogle with whom I’d hunted twenty years earlier had driven nearly three hours to pick us up in Cairns, and we finally got a message to him by calling our daughter Lisa at my office in Lompoc and asking her to tell Chris we wouldn’t arrive until the next day. All the airports in New Zealand still were fogged in. When we finally reached Cairns, Chris drove us to his farm where the first thing we saw when we stepped into his living room was the framed photo I’d taken of the water buffalo tossing him. We had a great dinner that evening. The next day, Chris gave Marty a tour of his farm when they went out to look for a cow that was calving. After that, he flew me over a coffee plantation and a forest in his two-seat ultra light aircraft. It was extremely windy that day, but we stayed up for thirty minutes. Author and a very good Javan Rusa Deer After returning to Cairns, we flew to Darwin and drove to Adelaide, where I hunted the Mary River Station again (this time with John Turner of Author with his Banteng hunting the Mary River