PARAGLIDING!

Finally, after two and a half weeks of waiting, Hannah, Chris, and I went paragliding this morning. We made our appointment on one of our first days in Pokhara, but rain forced us to postpone. Then every time we tried to reschedule, it ended up being either rainy or cloudy. Because we are approaching monsoon season, it rains most nights and usually for a little while during the day. When we saw it was sunny this morning, we quickly called the paragliding company and they said we could try to go today, as long as the weather stayed nice. We hurried to their office, climbed in the back of a truck, picked up the pilots on the way, and drove for 30 minutes up to Sarangkot, a village way on top of a big hill. When we got to the top, the pilots laid out their parachutes and Hannah and I got harnessed up (there were only two pilots, so Hannah and I went first and Chris went after we landed). We got instructions on how to take off—-start walking when the pilot tells you to walk, then start running when he tells you to run, and don’t sit or jump—-and then, before we knew it, Hannah and her pilot were launching. I waited for another anxious 15 minutes before we got a good wind and Anil, my pilot, said it was our turn to go. And then we ran off the top of the hill and were in the air, just like that, flying over Pokhara. It was amazing. We could see monkeys playing in the trees below, and farmers doing their daily chores, and kids playing outside, and cows grazing, and we just soared above it all. I asked Anil if he could do some stunts, and when we climbed high enough he did a “wingover,” which I don’t really know how to describe but involved sort of swooping back and forth quickly, in a stomach-turning, roller coaster-y sort of way. Waaaay fun. And then it was time for us to land. I was supposed to start running when we got close to the ground, but, of course, in my non-graceful sort of way, we basically just hit the ground and stopped. Hannah got the whole landing on film. Then the pilots went back to the top and we waited for Chris to fly down and join us. Paragliding is definitely one of the coolest things I’ve ever done, and I think Hannah and Chris would agree.