Skydiving has been long pending on my bucket list, i have always wondered what it would be like to fly. During childhood, we all have pretended to fly like a plane or a bird. I always wanted to be a fighter jet pilot but luckily or unluckily, life had a different plan for me.
As I have moved to Amsterdam, Netherlands for work from India, I am exploring europe, which has many of the planet earth's beautiful places. I planned to go skydive in Texel (sounds like "Tessel"), Netherlands which is an island in North Holland.
How to reach Texel from Amsterdam?
We decided to travel by public transport, which is quite reliable in Netherlands.
We started from Amsterdam Central around 8 am and took NS train towards Den Helder. (Trains run every half an hour.)
After reaching Den Helder, you have two options, either walk or take bus no 33 towards the port. We decided to walk and came across Dutch Navy Museum, Den Helder which we got to see some old ships and even submarines.
We didn't have much time to explore Den Helder and took a ferry from the port to Texel Island which usually flee every half an hour to and fro. You can buy the Teso Ferry tickets online or on-spot for a to and fro cost of 2.5 euros per person. Teso have some really nice ferry which have huge capacity and is largely used by people for transportation and you are even permitted to take your cycles, motorcycles and four wheeler (cars / vans).
After you reach Texel island, you have some public transport options, if you want to go to the main town, you can take Connexxion bus service ( your ov-chipkaart works :D ), but if you have to go to some other part of the island like we want to go to Paracentrum Texel (Skydiving Center), so you have to take TexelHopper which is basically a shuttle service which runs on hourly basis but there is a catch, you have to book your travel online in advance and there is no option to buy on-spot tickets and we were not aware of the situation and missed the most recent shuttle which wa available at 10 am and when we tried to book the tickets online, it required you to authenticate using e.identifier provided by your dutch bank to make the payment using IDEAL payment gateway.
Just a heads up, please make your booking in advance for TexelHopper from their website and tickets cost 3 euros per journey.
We finally reached the Skydiving center and booked our slot for skydiving and the wait started. It is an out of the world feeling which you have when you free fall and I enjoyed every second of it. My tandem was Mike Milton, a professional skydiver from Sydney, Australia and have a great interest in the cricket, especially India vs Australia matches, which are among the best cricket teams in the world today. Mike kept me informed about the basics and all the information which i needed to know like what altitude, we will be jumping from and at what altitude, he will open the parachute and he won my trust.
All set to go:
Just a few seconds away:
and there you go:
After he opened the parachute, we were in the sky around 4000ft above the ground and then he taught me some basics to control a parachute and we talked more about cricket and how much he liked the Indian Cricket team Captain, Virat Kohli.
After we landed, the skydiver (photographer) Kim Reuvers, interviewed me again and asked about my experience. I feel its an awesome sport for people who like to experience adrenaline rush. I will surely go for skydiving again, it's kind of addictive.
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Regards,
Abhinav Badola
