Making the leap: how Macau became home to the world’s highest bungy jump

He has competed for the New Zealand Speed Skiing Team, leapt – without permission – off the Eiffel Tower and earned several Guinness World Records for feats such as bungy jumping out of a helicopter. But to hear A.J. Hackett tell it, a life of action and adventure was pretty much sealed into his DNA.

The man behind the world’s highest bungy jump – 233 metres at Macau Tower – hails from a long line of mountaineers and explorers, including an uncle who was a member of Sir Edmund Hillary’s historic 1958 expedition to the South Pole. “Another uncle had a snow grooming machine, and he used to drive that to the top of the mountain for visitors,” Hackett, now 56, recalls. “So they really had an affinity for the mountains and the ocean.”​

Hackett also grew up by the ocean near Auckland, New Zealand, on one of the most populated streets in the country at the time. “There was always a lot of action going on,” he says. “It was close to the beach, so we spent a lot of time on the water, scrambling around the rocks looking for all sorts of things.”

His mother, an adventurer who travelled the world alone in the 1940s, wouldn’t allow her children to simply sit around the house. “It was basically, ‘Do whatever you want to do, as long as you’re not harming anyone else’. That was one of my mum’s early philosophies: ‘He’s going to do it anyway, so I’ll just turn around. But don’t come crying to me if you hurt yourself’.”

It’s a philosophy that served Hackett well when the young builder met fellow adrenaline lover Chris Sigglekow and started working on a modern version of a Pentecost Island ritual in which men jumped off 35-metre-high wooden towers with vines attached to their ankles.

“The very first thing Chris and I decided was we’ve got to make this thing predictable,” Hackett says. “We wouldn’t just show up at a bridge and throw ourselves off. We’d throw weights off first, measure the bridge, make the bungy, throw it off, film it, watch it. And if it went well, we would flip a coin to see which one of us would go first."