I met Sebastian Alvarez the day he jumped off a cliff.
I was standing there close to the abyss, staring at the towering Swiss Alps from a pathway near the town of Murren, when he wandered over and introduced himself with a friendly smile. We chatted for a few minutes, then he bumped my fist with his, took a deep breath, and threw himself into the deep ravine.
From high above I could see him slowly disappear, hurtling towards the valley floor, before he exploded in a bloom of colour as his parachute opened and he floated safely down. Amazing.
To me, it had seemed scary enough just tackling the "via ferrata". That's why I was on that mountaintop high in the Bernese Oberland. Between the towns of Murren and Gimmelwald there's a 2.2-kilometre track that's precarious in some places, and properly frightening in others.
At one point, just near where I saw Sebastian take his leap of faith, the path is nothing more than a few metal bars that have been sunk into the cliff face above a vertical drop of about 800 metres. That, to me, is scary. But to loosen your grip from there, to bend your knees slightly and then push yourself into the abyss? That's something else.
The most remarkable thing about Sebastian's jump, however, was that for Sebastian, it wasn't remarkable at all. It was probably the fourth or fifth time he'd zipped up his wingsuit and stepped out into thin air that day.
It turns out the guy is BASE jumping royalty, a daredevil with thousands of leaps from clifftops and other dizzyingly high things to his name. He has tens of thousands of followers on Instagram. He's the guy who does all of those crazy things you see people do in action movies and on Red Bull videos.
And yet he's a nice guy, a guy who introduces himself and chats to the gawkers standing on the clifftops waiting to see someone do something they would never have the guts (or, maybe, lack of brains) to do. He says "of course" when you ask it if it's OK to take photos of him as he jumps.
Seemingly normal people do some pretty amazing things. I've watched BASE jumpers from afar for years, marvelling at their complete disregard for their own mortality as they partake in one of the most exciting but probably the most dangerous sports in the world.
I would never do it. I'd love to do it, but I would never do it. I just couldn't put my life in that much danger. But I've often wondered what the people who do that would be like, and in Murren I was surrounded by them.
They were all there in the cable car on the way up from Lauterbrunnen, chatting about quitting their jobs to chase their cliff-jumping dreams, fiddling with their GoPros, talking about the guy who caught a freak gust of wind a few days ago and got his parachute tangled up on the cliff-face and had to wait seven hours dangling hundreds of metres above the ground before he was rescued. And they mentioned it so nonchalantly.
This is, without doubt, my favourite thing about travel: meeting normal people who do amazing things. Maybe you don't consider throwing yourself off a cliff to be an amazing thing, but I do. And anyway, you'll always meet plenty of other people who do all manner of different activities that make the world a more interesting place.
I met an Austrian couple once who'd cycled their bikes from Norway all the way to South Africa, and then circumnavigated Australia, and then – because they hadn't had enough yet – they cycled from Alaska to the bottom of Argentina. Normal people who'd been doing amazing things.
In Sicily I met an Iraqi refugee who'd been granted asylum in Sweden and had started an English language school for fellow immigrants. In Fiji I met two Australian guys who were on leave from the army after doing their second tour of the Helmand province in Afghanistan.
You don't get exposed to people like this in your normal routine. It's rare in the everyday cycle of eat-sleep-work-repeat that you'd have the chance to meet someone who's done something incredible, something inspiring.
That's why travel is so great, because it exposes you to a whole world of people and possibilities. It makes you realise that those people who do amazing, inspiring things are not much different to those people who don't. They've just taken a chance. A leap of faith.
And not all of them, fortunately, have been as literal as Sebastian's.
b.groundwater@fairfaxmedia.com.au
