CONTENTS
Before we start, we should say that this isn’t a neatly ordered list of the highest bungee jumps that you can find around the world, there are already dozens of those available. Our list is more subjective, it goes beyond the cold, hard figures and rates the jumps by their ability to make you stomach lurch and your head spin just by looking at them. In other words, by their dizzy factor.
What’s more, we’ve organised it by continent to help you find the wildest bungee jump in your part of the world, wherever you are or you’re going to be. If you want to know more about the basics of bungee jumping before we kick the list off, check out our guide to bungee jumping.
ASIA
Name: Zhangjiajie Glass Bridge Bungee
Location: China
Height: 260 metres
Dizzy Factor: 9
Okay, okay, so we're starting with the highest bungee jump in the world - but not just because it’s high. Obviously it is hugely, monstrously high, but it’s the intensity of the whole experience that makes it almost seem like it’s been designed to score highly on our dizzy factor scale.
Before you even get to the jump site, you have to walk halfway across a glass-bottomed suspension bridge - the tallest such bridge in the world - that stretches across the Grand Canyon of Zhangjiajie. Some people are put off from even crossing the bridge by the gaping abyss that’s visible below, so to then throw yourself down towards the canyon bottom takes nerves of steel.
AFRICA
Name: Bloukrans Bridge
Location: South Africa
Height: 216 metres
Dizzy Factor: 8
Our next featured jump is the highest in the Southern Hemisphere, but, once again, it’s not just the height that earns it a place on this list. Bloukrans Bridge spans 451 metres of thin air from one side to the other of Nature’s Valley. To give you an idea of how long that is, it would take an Olympic sprinter about a minute to run across it at full tilt. Standing at the centre of the bridge and looking out makes you feel like you’re hovering high above the ground - a feeling that disappears spectacularly quickly when you get up the courage to jump.
THE AMERICAS
Name: Rio Grande Gorge Bridge
Location: New Mexico, USA
Height: 206
Dizzy Factor: 8.5
The bungee jump above the Rio Grande earns an extra half a point on the dizzy factor scale because a) plunging towards running water always adds a touch of something special to a jump, and b) because it’s only available on a select few dates every year. Any economist will tell you that scarcity drives up the value of a product on the market, and it’s the same here - the fact that not everyone can do it, that it can’t be done all the time, makes it feel much more special.
AUSTRALASIA
Name: Kawarau Bridge
Location: Queenstown, New Zealand
Height: 43
Dizzy Factor: 6
At less than 50 metres in height, you might be wondering why this one deserves to be on the list. Actually, we have a few reasons, which include the stunning location on New Zealand’s South Island - that’s where they filmed the Lord of the Rings you know - and the running Kawarau river below. But chiefly it’s down to the fact that this was the first commercial bungee jump in the world, established in 1988 by legendary thrill seeker AJ Hackett, and there’s something thrilling about jumping from the spot where it all began.
EUROPE
Name: Verzasca Dam
Location: Switzerland
Height: 220 metres
Dizzy Factor: 8.5
Also known as the Contra Dam or the Locarno Dam, this is a concrete megastructure that’s almost as impressive, if not nearly as beautiful, as the Swiss Alps that it cuts through. This bungee jump location has a high dizzy factor thanks to its starring role in the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye. At the beginning of the film, 007 leaps from the parapet of the dam and drops like a stone to a service entrance near the bottom in order to infiltrate the enemy’s base. If pretending to be James Bond isn’t enough to get your heart racing, we don’t know how to help you. Oh, and did we mention that it’s the third highest bungee jump in the world?
THE UK
Name: 300ft Jump
Location: Manchester and Windsor
Height: 92 metres
Dizzy Factor: 7
Well what about British Bungee Jumping? Are there drops here with a dizzy factor to bring out adrenaline junkies in droves? There certainly are. The highest jumps in the UK are set at 300 feet. Compared to others on the list, that's not huge. But if you imagine a 100 metre running track standing on its end, that’s about as far as you’re going to drop! The best thing about this kind of jump is that you can experience it at two different locations - Bray Lake in Berkshire and Tatton Park in Greater Manchester.
You might have noticed that we haven’t awarded 10 to any of these spine-tingling jumps. That’s because we’re optimists at Yumping.co.uk - we know that someone, somewhere can come up with an even crazier bungee jump than the one’s on the list and we’ll give it full marks.
