5x5 Fun Friday: Five bucket list experiences I’d like to try

About 16 years ago I won the chance to wing-walk on a biplane over the English countryside, and I absolutely loved it. Strapped into a very sturdy harness on top of an over-engineered stunt plane with an experienced pilot, all I had to do was scream with delight for a few minutes as we zoomed and soared.

The most frightening part of the experience was the bumpy take-off and landing on an old WW2 airfield, but once we were off the ground it was perfectly smooth, and even the wind against my face was surprisingly even and easy to breathe. Since then, I’ve bumped a Vauxhall Corsa over the Sahara, burned around a couple of racetracks on trackdays, scuba dived off the UAE and the Great Barrier Reef, and rope-walked above Sydney Zoo (which was a lot scarier than I expected).

So (in the best Carrie Bradshaw style) I got to thinking about other crazy bucket list experiences I’d like to try.

1 Skydiving I’m not sure where the dividing line sits between just parachuting and skydiving. I’d guess it’s the time you spend dawdling on the way down before you open your ‘chute, and that’s exactly why I’d prefer to skydive over simple parachuting. You might not do it again, or at least not many times, so if you’re going to jump from a lethal height with only a piece of fabric to stop you, then you should take time to enjoy the view and turn a couple of somersaults on the way down. For the same reason, I can’t see the point in bungee-jumping.

2 Wreck diving When I got my PADI Open Water scuba qualification, the first thing my instructor asked was what I’d like to do next, because you can choose two specialities when you go for the Advanced Open Water course. I’ll have to clock up a few hours in the deeps before I can get that far, but nosing around in sunken ships sounds like a lot of fun, and they’re a great place to see different kinds of sealife. You need the advanced qualification even to go near most wrecks because of the extra dangers they pose, and that’s becoming important with sunken ships creating deliberate and accidental artificial reefs around the world.

You can also use wreck diving to investigate other underwater structures like flooded buildings in dammed lakes. There are at least a couple in China, including a section of the Great Wall that’s now truly impassable. It also gets you used to being underwater in the dark, which is useful for…

3 Night diving There are no guarantees that I’d be brave enough to dive at night, but you’ll see a completely different kind of life under the waves at night, whether you’re on a reef or in the open ocean near a sea-mount. Some of it is probably a bit more bitey and less afraid of people, but it would be a thrill to see how the reef changes at night, and to learn to navigate by compass, keeping your buddy within reach all the time. I wouldn’t take my last dive buddy, who was dawdling 50 metres behind the group every time I turned around. But it’s definitely something I’d try to try.

4 Rally driving I’ve had fun at track days, but it’s a very technical experience compared to the joy of bouncing around the Sahara in a car that might rapidly disassemble itself at any moment. Rally driving, I’d guess, is somewhere between that, with a lot more potential for bumpy endings but a lot more opportunity for screaming and laughing as you just hang on to the track. Plus you get to learn to drift and control spins a lot more than you need to on the track. And then wanting to do it some more.

5 Zorbing down a mountain I have no idea why, but I find the idea of flying down a steep hill inside a giant inflatable ball really attractive.