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Short Breaks

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Why you can trust SCMP
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PHUKET, THAILAND: 'Check please.' 'Check.' 'Eighty-four kilos using red bungy.' 'Check.' 'Carabiner one locked and looped.' 'Check.' 'Carabiner two locked and looped through.' 'Check.' No more than a couple of metres away, to a highly preoccupied mind the jumpmasters' calls seem remote. Each item on their checklist is reassuring, but terrifying. The painstaking roll-call means nothing is left to chance. But each cry of 'check' brings you one step closer to the exit line: 'Three, two, one - BUNGY!' With a jerk, the hoist starts the 50-metre climb up the arm of a crane above Kathu Lake, a former tin mine in the dead centre of Phuket. The view - forest, sea and villages - is stupendous. The prospect of launching yourself towards it so illogical it goes way past the ridiculous. Then with a second sickening jerk, the hoist stops. The jumpmaster is calm, friendly. The gap in the side of the hoist incredibly hostile. Ankles tightly wadded, you shuffle forward. How could you ever have taken terra firma for granted? How could religion have once seemed so unimportant? A final breath, then dive, dive, dive ...

Ecstasy. Exuberance. Exhilaration. All your senses jangle. The air tears up your nostrils. The bungy reaches full stretch, and you are sailing upwards, then down again, yo-yoing half a dozen times. The hoist rattles earthward and the jumpmaster on the ground holds out a pole to swing you in gently from above the lake to the comfort of solid ground, where - swollen with new-found confidence - you receive a glorious hero's welcome for one who has diced with death and won.

Cut to after-hours in the beach-side human safari park of Patong, a Fellini-esque mesh of bars and go-go emporia, amplified through outsize speakers and spiced with testosterone. At the end of Soi Sunset stands a Heath Robinson contraption that looks like something from an early Soviet bloc space programme. If the jungle bungy is about defying the elements in a natural setting, the Catapult is science fiction come to life.

It is only open at night, when hordes of tourists resembling the cast of Mad Max come out to play and 'Amazing Thailand' seems to give its advertising slogan full force. The bars erupt into a maelstrom of noise and neon. Fuelled by alcohol and dare-devilry, one by one the kamikaze step forward to be strapped into a harness and accelerated 40 metres skyward into the night, ending their brief flight dangling above the road as the crowd roars below.

One second your feet are firmly on the outlines painted on the roadway with the catapult at full stretch, the next the jumpmaster has released the cord binding you to earth and - in direct contravention to Isaac Newton's apple - you spring into the night to bounce up and down over the town. And over the moon; a survivor.

The Bungy. The Catapult. Fifteen minutes of fame and fear. Five years of therapy.

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