Skydive Bovec, Slovenia
It is now possible to attend skydiving events in many exotic places around the world. Motivated and connected planners have pushed out boogie boundaries into a new category of parachuting holiday – packaged adventure within which jumping out of aeroplanes is a central element, but also sold just as much on the peripheral activities and experiences available. Want to land next to a jagged glacier or on a tropical archipelago? With sufficient time and money, you totally can.
Any event needs to deliver on what it is primarily offering. A skills camp will likely have a party, but at the end, the attendees need to feel real progression. You can learn many things at a boogie, but fun and inclusivity are a high priority. An adventure trip needs to deliver some interesting skydives among stimulating circumstances, the added complexity meaning personal advancement often takes a back seat. Missing the goalposts on what your event advertises risks indifference from the community going forwards.
Adventure Boogie is one of the hottest tickets of the Summer, and is possibly the closest thing to an event that offers a customizable experience. Bovec was an adventure sports town long before skydiving showed up – and has the infrastructure to support many tourists seeking calorie-burning thrills on land, in the water, and up in the air. The Tora Tora team uses Skydive Bovec as a central hub to manage a huge list of activities across the Soca Valley region of the Southeastern alps, bringing together both local instructors and international coaching talent for everything from downhill longboarding to freediving to paragliding to speedflying.
Tora Tora have been running skydiving events for a long time, and understand well the things required to aim for what connects with people as special. Managing almost two hundred people each week is a colossal undertaking – reflected in the sheer number of staff present to help handle everything. With so much going on every day, even an operation as smooth as this is not immune to some friction at the manifest desk – but any such tension is smoothed by the fact that sufficient bodies mean tired staff get time off to decompress. As much as having secret locations for the various parties can add an extra layer of a logistical faff, moving away from the daytime hangar interior to cut loose for the evening is always worth the extra time and energy for any event.
Earlier in the year, Tora Tora lost one of its key members in a speedflying accident in Switzerland. Rene Terstegen was a highly regarded and hugely popular member of the skydiving community and will be deeply missed – perhaps acutely so by the staff and attendees of Adventure Boogie, many of whom return year after year to revisit the unique experience of this particular mountain paradise – to which Rene’s contribution was huge.
The Tora Tora team understands well that evolution and change are an important part of success when it comes to delivering events that people celebrate as top-tier. New sports were added to Adventure Boogie this year, as was the chance to complete an AFF course during the event – with four new skydivers created across the two weeks. With hundreds of jumpers representing over thirty countries making the trip to Slovenia, this is an important gathering for equipment manufacturers to connect with people from far and wide. The vendor village was well turned-out for the most spectacular of European backgrounds, with some saying it is the best area we have collectively created thus far.
If you like to travel for skydiving events, Skydive Bovec is a must-see destination, and Adventure Boogie is the most sought-after time to do so. With so much on offer, it might be prudent to commit to a certain set of goals – build your skills, explore the valley, or aim to party – as trying to do everything is impossible. Being beset with an abundance of choice is certainly not a bad problem to have though.