It's time for another blog about awesomeness. This time, I shall regale you with the tale of the time i did Paragliding (or paraponting as it's called in France).
I frequent a ski resort in the Alps called Val D'isere. It's a nice, quite town with great skiing in the winter, plenty of outdoorsy stuff in the summer, and even if you're too lazy to go out you can just stay in and switch off no problem. In Val, they have Paraponting courses in the summer and free trials in the winter. I had always seen these going on but had never taken the time to try it out myself - until last year when after New years, I made it a point to make sure I tried it out.
So I go up the mountain, meet the guy and he straps me into this harness, with him on my back to do most of the actual flying. Then he points me off the edge of a cliff, and tells me to start skiing forward (I forgot to mention that in Paragliding you have to run, or in winter ski, off the edge of a mountain to get up speed and lifting thrust). Now the scariest bit is just going, but once you've gone, holy crap is it awesome.
To say feeling weightless is a lie - the whole time I could feel my skis and boots on my legs and desperately prayed to the gods not to let them fall off. Then there is the whole bit about not looking down: this is ok, but the bit you really don;t want to do is look up - way scarier.
Apart from that it was amazing, the feeling of soaring in the air at your leisure is indescribable. The instructor even let me have a go piloting for a bit, and once I'd unclenched my hands from the harness to grab the handles, it was a bit intense: the feeling that if you let go you are going down fast is pretty unnerving, but not as much as the instructor pointing to a near by mountain and saying in broken english 'do that way'. He had me steer us right up to a flock of birds that were flying around the edge of this mountain and wave to them.
Then he took over and flew us towards the ground (it turns out in winter you can't stay up all day; shame really). But as we were going down he decided to do a couple of fancy barrel rolls - if you ever want to know what it feels like to have your stomach flying into your neck, then Paragliding is the sport for you.
