BUNGEE JUMPING is for wimps. Make your way over to Pentecost Island, Vanuatu, between April and June each year and you'll find the locals engaging in land diving. This entails tying a vine around your ankle and jumping off a 30-metre bamboo tower.
Believed to ensure a good yam harvest, it's been going on for more than 1,000 years and is an important ritual for locals. The other big event on their calendar is circumcision, which coincides with a boy's first land dive. All in all, a pretty memorable day.
Because vines aren't known for their elastic properties, jumpers have to be precise with their measurements, as the aim is to get their heads to skim the ground. Sometimes they hit it a little too hard, and sometimes they die, as when Queen Elizabeth II visited in the 1970s. These days, land diving has cult status as a spectator sport, with tourists paying through the nose to see the locals land on theirs.
Driving the thrill-seekers on, no doubt, is the knowledge that hitting the ground with a splat is only one of the risks involved. Cut your vine too short and you'll instead hit the tower structure with a splat.
As always, there's a woman to blame. Tradition has it that the first land diver was a local woman who ran up a banyan tree while being chased by her husband and, seeing him follow her up, jumped off. He jumped too, without realising she had first secured a vine to her ankle. What's less clear is which of their actions the ritual is actually celebrating.
