My World Tour: Zorbing in New Zealand

My World Tour: Zorbing in New Zealand

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So what is this Zorb thing - huh? I mean is it something to do with that Greek guy, or is it some sort of new circus act? Perhaps it's a new breed of pygmy-elephant designed to take over from those weird little pigs everyone was into a few years back.

Well, to tell you the truth the Zorb is none of these things ... and more.

The Zorb is the latest adventure experience brought to you from that little spot of land way down in the corner of your map called New Zealand. Yeah - get your atlases out, brush off the cobwebs from your old geography school-books - I'm not lying, you'll find it way off to the right and South of that big lump of land called Australia. OK, for those of you too lazy to search it out I'll try and find a web page that'll show you where we are .... hold on ....... dammit there's gotta be something here .... OK here you go (mind you, make sure you come right back here after your quick trip to the Antipodes.)

Anyway, as I was saying, the Zorb is the latest adventure experience from New Zealand. The place that brought you all Bungy jumping, Jet boating, the bar-fly, Sir Edmund Hillary, the All Blacks, Split Enz, Dame Edna Everidge (no - hang on - she's from Australia, whew that was close). Anyway - the point is we've brought you heaps of great stuff and the Zorb is the latest in a long line.

Still, this is not a History lesson or a Geography lesson.

The Zorb is big, it's fat, it's round and bouncy, you jump inside it, it rolls, you roll too - Ah ....what the hey, here's a picture:

Does this help with my explanation?

look if you want more pictures ... I've got a new page full of 'em check it out - pictures

You see, that's a person in the middle of this big ball. He's got about 700 mm of air between him and the ground - that's about 2 feet for you metrically challenged folks - and this air cushion keeps him safe as he hurtles down the side of a hill at speeds of up to 50 kilometres per hour. The idea is that as the ball rolls around, the person inside (known as "the Zorbonaut") becomes pinned to the inside, just like water inside a bucket being spun around your head. (My physics teacher from many years ago claimed that this was due to a force called Inertia, but us less enlightened folks refer to it as centrifugal force - See Mr Saunders I was listening - it was just my eyes that were closed.)

Testing on the side of One Tree Hill in New Zealand By the way, the above explanation also holds true for females, you just need to replace every occurrence of "he" and "him" in the above paragraph with "she" and "her" - easy!

The article was from www.zorb.com . Top 4 photos are from Bruce