April 2004
Published in London Sport
I bundled myself into a motor-rickshaw and said “Go! Go!” It was a mistake. The policeman pushed a few onlookers out the way, jumped in beside me and smiled a beetle-nut-red stained smile. It was 8pm on New Year’s Eve and I had been ‘arrested’.
In my rucksack was a paraglider, harness, gps, vario, radio and digital video camera; practically everything on the electronic ‘banned’ list for India. The policeman barked a few words at the driver and we throttled off to the police station.
The beauty of a paraglider is that you can pack it in a bag, walk to the top of a hill, lay it out, launch, and – if your skill, the conditions and luck come together – fly for miles. The world distance record is 427km, the world height gain record is 4500m and flights of 100km by ‘weekend’ pilots are fairly commonplace; and all on a canopy made of fabric attached to lines mere millimetres thick.
The initial attraction is the thrill of it; the sheer excitement the first time the canopy comes cleanly above your head and you leave the ground silently behind. The buzz from landing so smoothly, so gently, like a feather floating onto a millpond is so great that beginners are instantly hooked.
Weeks later, after another fruitless day ‘chasing the wind’ around the South Downs and your instructor advises you to come back again, the weather’s sure to improve, you realise you’re addicted.
From there it’s a short hop to lusting over the magazines, quitting your job and travelling the world. The Alps first, then central Spain, Australia, Chile, Nepal, Brazil…
Paragliders (any gliders in fact – hang-gliders and sail-planes work on the same principle) use rising air to stay aloft. It’s either dynamic lift – wind blowing up a slope – or thermic lift, rising parcels of warm air called thermals. The dedicated UK beginner will go from floating in dynamic lift to circling in thermals in a summer. From there the sport of cross-country flying opens up.
Cross-country means flying from thermal to thermal for miles, leaving your take-off hill far behind. It’s a bit like ski mountaineering in the high mountains compared to resort skiing: more advanced and a whole lot more rewarding. It’s this aspect of the sport that takes pilots across the globe in pursuit of distance, height, or simply old-fashioned adventure.
It’s why I was in the Sayhadri Hills of Maharashtra, India, with a handful of local pilots on holiday from Bombay. We’d slowly been exploring the valleys and tablelands around Panchgani from the sky for a week. By New Year’s Eve, the conditions were booming – thermals ripped past the hill and left dust devils behind them, whipping dirt into our eyes and grounding us. But at three o’clock the wind eased and we launched, and went straight up.
People imagine gliding to be really tranquil. It’s not. Imagine hanging onto a horse as it gallops to the clouds: that’s what thermalling a paraglider is like in strong conditions.
As you turn tightly, you are listening to your variometer, which beeps faster and higher the stronger the lift, and wails like a drowning cat when your rising air turns to sinking air. The trick is to turn as tightly as possible in the strongest lift to get the fastest climb rate. If you hang about, or your thermalling technique is sloppy, you’ll lose it – and your hard-won height will disappear very fast.
I looked at the vario: 2300m and still going up… this was going pretty high. Suddenly the day was coming together. I got to 2500m then saw another pilot, Sumit, making scratchy looking circles about 2km in front. I flew straight towards him and soon we were spiralling up together at four-metres-a-second – about 800ft a minute, an exciting and solid, but not gut-wrenching climb rate.
The thermal topped us out at 2800m; we were literally a mile above India. In front were valleys and ridges, stacked like fences to jump, behind Sumit gradually lost height until I saw him land deep in the valley below. Slowly, painstakingly I flew on for two hours, climbing and gliding across valleys, past tiny villages tucked into the hillsides beneath the shadows of cliffs.
Towards the south the hills gradually opened out into broader valleys, and slowly disappeared as they came down to meet the coastal plain. As I came in to land I saw the first farm worker look up as my shadow passed across his field.
It was 5.30pm on New Years Eve. I was 42km in a straight line from take off and I had flown right across the Sayhadris to land at 30m above sea level. Coconut palms were dotted among the villages and it was noticeably hotter. It would take 19 hours to get home via a dozen cups of welcome tea, the police station, a hotel and the 150km of winding mountain roads. Happy New Year I said to myself.
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