Outdoor skydiving

Telling yourself you’re a daredevil if you do indoor skydiving is like believing you’re being healthy if you have a Diet Coke with your Big Mac meal. It’s just plain cheating. Besides, ‘indoor skydiving’ is bit of an oxymoron: there’s no sky indoors, and you’re not actually diving, you’re doing the exact opposite: being propelled upwards.

Sure, with outdoor skydiving you have to sign a lengthy liability waver that states, in bold, unavoidable print, ‘Skydiving is a dangerous sport and may result in serious injury and/or death’. Sure, you shake your way up to 10,000ft in the air in a rickety old plane that looks like it couldn’t hold a feather duvet, yet alone six hefty humans. Sure, when you’re falling through the sky at speeds of up to 220kmph the only thing that will eventually stop you splatting is a paper-thin piece of material…

But this is what’s so fun about it. You can only get an adrenaline rush when you feel like you’re in danger; floating indoors a mere two foot above some meshed netting is hardly life threatening.

You don’t have to think too much about your technique either, as the instructor does all the hard work for you – all you need to do is put your head back, cross your arms and scream. A lot. And once you’re out the door, surprisingly, it’s not scary anymore: you’re too busy taking in the amazing view to be scared.

In the UAE, the only place to get your flying fix is the Umm Al Quwain Aeroclub, and, on a good day, you can see as far as Dubai; the top of the towering Burj Dubai almost 10,000ft beneath you.

But it’s the mangroves that make this a really great place to jump: the turquoise waters and sandy islands have the blurred, swirling look of marble. It’s breathtaking. Surely it beats staring down at the netting of the Spacewalk’s vertical wind tunnel – not to mention trying to avoid the stares of the people gawping from behind the plexi-glass surrounding you. There’s no question, you can’t beat the real thing. So stop being a pansy and jump out that plane door.
Prices for a tandem jump start at Dhs1,000.