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Sky Rider
Dangling in the skies, land thousands of metres below, paragliding
is the closest that one comes to flying. Will Marks dons the wings…
My paragliding journey began in India. I was riding an Enfield
Bullet around the Kullu Valley in 1999 when I saw paragliders in the sky. I
rode straight up to Solang Nallah and did a four day introductory course. Hooked,
I returned to Sydney, Australia, joined a club and worked up to an intermediate
rating with 40 hours flying time. My motivation was always to learn to fly cross-country
and return to the Himalaya. Australia has some world class flying sites, from
200 metre coastal cliffs to flatlands where world distance records of well over
300 kilometres were set. My favourite Australian site is in the Victorian Alps
- it's reminiscent of Billing; they've both staged Pre-World Cup events, but
Australian mountains don't have the epic grandeur of the Himalaya. I came back
to India with a paraglider in 2001 to realise my dream, and wasn't to be disappointed.
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Pics Courtesy:
Nirvana Adventures
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I headed straight for the legendary site of Billing in Himachal
Pradesh. The 45-minute drive up a rough road takes you a kilometre skyward and
gives the butterflies in your stomach plenty of time to kick in. The takeoff
is a cleared knoll at the edge of a ridge that seems to jut out into the void.
The town of Bir below is so distant through the vast ocean of air that it seems
to be on the bottom of the seabed. Snow capped mountains hunch below an enclosing
sky.
Ridge after ridge flows down from the Dhauladhar Ranges. I can make out where
the spines descend to the towns of Jogindernagar and Palampur, but no further.
It is 40 kilometres to Mandi in one direction as the crow flies and 45 kilometres
to Dharamsala. The dark blue material of my wing spreads out untidily behind
me, and seems woefully inadequate to achieve either of these more distant goals.
My takeoff goes smoothly. A warm thermal rustles in the canopy, bringing with
it some light vegetation and the smell from the forest, but the lift is limited.
I hug the top of the ridgeline, flying low and slow over trees that climb the
mountain. Langur monkeys start screaming and thrashing the branches, their black
and white bodies flashing through the green leaves.
 Then
I hook a good thermal - with each turn higher the layer of the foothills drops
like a veil revealing endless ranges of permanently snow-covered peaks, each
layer higher than the last. Once rugged ridges and valleys seem to fold and
flow. Snow covered mountains ripple down to the plains like waves on a beach.
It doesn't just inspire minor poetics, but genuine ineffable awe. Sitting in
only a harness, you feel like your body is dangling in space; the valley floor
is now thousands of metres below. You're very much in the scene, feeling every
caress of the wind, but also detached, floating above it all. After thousands
of years, now, this is possible.
The only noise is the wind whispering in the wing and my breath amplified in
my helmet. The next thermal is marked by half a dozen Himalayan Griffin Vultures,
birds with a two metre wingspan and a heavy body that makes them look like a
flying Labrador. I join them, continuing on as part of the pack for the next
20 kilometres as we work a perfect cloud street that runs all the way to Dharamsala.
We fly over rocky peaks and past huge lonely meadows until we see a town occupying
the curve on a steep ridge. The Dalai Lama's temple and residence is perched
where the ridge drops off to the mist, and I recognise it as McLeod Ganj, Upper
Dharamsala - the goal's achieved, but the real goal is the journey.
(The author is a New Zealander who has written The Highway,
a fictional work based on his travels in India)
| Only in the 1980s did it become possible for a man to
climb a mountain with a wing on his back and literally fly away; a few kilometres
up and hundreds of kilometres away, all using just air currents, an aerofoil
made of nylon and a little skill.
Most of the world's 200,000 odd paragliding pilots are in the alpine areas
of Europe, but the sport's catching on worldwide with great sites and rapidly
growing pilot numbers in the Americas, Australia, South Africa, Japan, Korea,
and India.
India came to the attention of the world paragliding community in 1992 when
Frenchman Xavier Remond set a world record by flying 132 km from Billing
in Himachal Pradesh. Top pilots were lured to the challenge of Himalaya,
including New Zealander Bruce Mills. He stayed on and is credited with training
a generation of local pilots, along with Roshan Lal Thakur who runs the
Himalayan Institute of Adventure Sports in Kullu Valley. Debu Chaudhry,
a Manali local, was barely a teenager when he began flying with Mills ten
years ago. In 2003, when India competed at a Paragliding World Cup for the
first time, Chaudhry was part of the three member team. He now travels between
Europe, Himachal Pradesh and Nepal working as an instructor and tandem pilot.
Also on the team were Gurpreet Dhindsa, who has a paragliding school based
in Bir, and Adie Kumar who recently competed in Australia and Japan.
Paragliding is becoming increasingly popular with weekend pilots. It's accessible
to any adult with basic fitness and a sense of adventure. For competitive
pilots it can be an 'extreme sport'; others choose to fly in a way which
is more relaxed, even meditative. Leaving the noise and gravity of the takeoff
for the solitude of the air can feel like a flight to peace and freedom.
Vast improvements in glider design and technology have made beginner level
gliders safe enough.
Over a dozen schools operate in India, from the mountains of Himachal Pradesh
to the ranges of the Western Ghats and coastal sites of Goa. Thousands of
Indian pilots have been trained in the last decade. The basic skills required
for solo flights can be picked up in a week long course. This includes classroom
time studying the theory of flight, and how weather and geography affect
your glider. Then a few days are spent learning to control the glider on
the ground, and practising taking off and landing. Flying itself maybe the
easy part - to start with you'll be in calm conditions, often with radio
contact to tell you when to turn by pulling the hand-held brakes. In calm
conditions paragliders practically fly themselves - but the catch is they'll
glide back down to earth. The trick is learning to keep them up in the air.
You may get a few hours flight time during that first week. Once you've
spent 20 hours or so in the air getting comfortable with the way a paraglider
reacts to a variety of conditions, you're ready for your first cross-country
flight. |
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