Thursday, May 29, 2008

@ the Native Place: Getting started with Paragliding

I took a 5 day break from my monotonous boredom to go Paragliding. First time pilot, no experience. The location was Native Place, the base for Fly Nirvana, at Kamshet.

First it was absolutely worth the money and the remote location and the bad roads. We had a hell of a great time. We ( me and cousin ) were lucky to meet two other people of a similar age - Rishabh and Apoorva.

For the first three days, I jotted down small notes on my cellphone, so here they are paraphrased. I'll recount the trip in detail in more posts. There will be quite a few of them.

24th May


  • 1:30pm - finished lunch. sitting in a hammock. leave for practice at 3.
  • 8:45pm - drinking soup. shoulders hurt, arms burned by friction, crap it was fun. ( This was first practice, ground handling and forward launch @ Shelar )




Shelar hill - our paragliding site

25th May


  • 6:23am - awake for 20min now. last night's bath will suffice. not much pain, shoulders tender though, will risk short sleeves ( For all 5 days we established a convention to only have a bath at night, although we could have used 2 a day, we were just too lazy )
  • 11:42am - more ground handling, got a few pushes to go about 3 ft in the air. fell once. rishabh had an encounter with a bush. Also practised Parachute Landing Falls - hopefully I'll never need them. I wore a long sleeved t-shirt after all.
  • 8:37pm - back to base from Shelar. Began bunny hops and short flights. upper body is crap ( it hurt so much! ) . chest jarred ( did a bad landing, the harness locked the jerk in ) . old injury haunts. ( this is something stupid that has been bothering me for 4 years now, some internal muscle out of place )

26th May


  • 8:54pm - another day of bunny hops. good success rate this time. stupid radio fails... sorry ravi :( ( The radio got switched off and I couldn't hear instructions when everyone else could here them. Ravi [ instructor ] was helping another student, and I bumped into him before killing the glider )


Other





A Jenga structure just before it fell. We built lots of these, one went 13 storeys. ( Yes, those are fresh gooseberries at the back! )

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