@ the Native Place: Getting started with Paragliding
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! )