Search Destinations (e.g. Byron Bay)

Denny is the lucky winner of our Win an Island Trip to New Caledonia competition. Below is his winning holiday story.

Zero G
A truly out-of-this-world experience
by Denny Prussian

Zero-G day arrived hot, but not hot enough to melt our nervous shivers.

The notion of willingly boarding a plane whose pilots deliberately intended to send that plane screaming towards the ground in thirty second increments seemed slightly more than surreal and slightly less than completely insane.

From the moment we met our guide it was all-systems-go, action-stations, countdown-begins-in-ten-seconds business.

We lined up with 25 other astro-novices to collect our official Zero-G uniforms and gear, sat through a pre-flight briefing and bussed out to the take-off zone. After the all-in photo beside the plane, we boarded for space and buckled in with our fellow yellows.

In our pre-flight briefing we had learned that we would first experience the equivalent of Mars gravity, then Lunar gravity and then Zero Gravity, and that each gravity would give us the sensation of instantaneous weight-loss (at multiplying degrees). We had also been told that our weight would multiply to 1.8 times normal at the top and bottom of each arc (imagine a plane flying on a sine-wave trajectory or over a series of camel humps and you can imagine our planned flight-path).

At 34-thousand feet, we received our 'Go' orders and, to a spontaneous burst of cheering, Group Yellow filed from the rear of the plane to our designated Zero-G space at the front of the empty section.

Gravity is force. For our entire lives, it pulls our limbs, our skin, our bones and our internal organs towards the centre of our planet. It is a force that never ceases and one that is only really felt when we fall down. I know now that it is impossible to imagine existence without that constant force unless such existence is actually experienced.

Mars gravity was relief. Lunar gravity was euphoria. Zero gravity was absolute and total freedom with absolutely no control applied or applicable.

Legs kicked and arms swam, but nothing happened. My body was no longer a handy little vehicle to drive my brain around in – it became instead a rudderless, brakeless lump of tidal flotsam in which my brain fumbled for a non-existent operating manual. I quickly learned, however, that although I could not efficiently traverse space, I could do the kind of amazing acrobatics usually added to Kung-Fu movies by special effects people with huge computers. I actually giggled as I Bruce-Lee'd and Matrix-ed gleefully in my little corner of Zero-G space.

Imagine a Forty-four-year-old, one-armed, bourbon-loving chain-smoker who can't run around the block without a paramedic on stand-by Chow Yun- Fat-ting merrily in a plane full of similarly amused thrill-seekers and you can imagine me in Zero-G.

Just before our 1.8G hiatus, the command came and we all fought our ways back to the floor. When the monster landed on us, it felt like every molecule in my body was being pinned by its own dead Sumo wrestler. I tried to rise and couldn't. I tried to lift my arm, but it wouldn't move, until, suddenly, weightless freedom returned.

When the final hump was flown and the Zero-G experience finished, we all offered another cheer and returned, melancholically, to the gravity lock-down of normality and our seats.

Back at the base, after the landing and return bus trip, we sipped champagne, ate canapes and luxurious sandwiches and generally congratulated one another on a thrill well done.