Regardless of where you live the flying season at your home site is unlikely year-round. As the 50, 100, 150+ hour goals are met and you feel like you’re starting to build a solid foundation of ground-handling, making good decisions in the air, and starting to stitch together some reasonable XC flights you might be thinking… it’s time to explore new air!
You’ve probably been regaled with stories of flying over the Sertão in Brazil, riding home by train after a multi-country flight in the Alps, or making the yearly migration to Bir, India; Pokhara, Nepal; Roldanillo, Colombia or Valle De Bravo, Mexico.
Your first big trip away from the known can be a little daunting. There’s the simple stuff like what to pack and do you need a visa, but there’s a lot that’s harder to pin down. Do I have the skills? What are the weather resources? How to get to launch? Do I need a guide? Should I go with a group or forge it alone?
Going alone or with a group really depends a lot on where you want to go, but it also depends on your skills. The Alps have grass covered launches and easy access from Monaco to Slovenia. You can certainly go it alone. But the Alps can and will bite and can easily overwhelm.
When I was starting to tick off my first decent XC flights I joined trips two years in a row that start in Annecy and end in Nice (or the reverse). Because they were guided I didn’t have to worry about the weather or a place to stay or where we would launch. We’d wake up, be taken up to launch, get a task and off we went. For a very reasonable cost I could avoid many of the stresses and fly many different sites, all of which is absurdly fun as well as educational. Plus I got very quality instruction from a seasoned pro.
I did the same for my first two trips to Bir. My first bivvy was flying wingtip to wingtip with the legend John Silvester from Bir “over the back” and top-landed above Manali at nearly 4,000 metres and slept where we landed huddled around a campfire. We woke up encased in ice the next morning, took off steps from where we’d landed and flew back to Bir for lunch before anyone had even launched from the standard take-off! Back then that kind of magic would have been impossible for me to create on my own.
Roldanillo, Colombia is certainly a place you can figure out on your own. There are plenty of vehicles heading to launch every morning, you can fly nearly every day, and you can land anywhere and flag a taxi or a bus and make it back home, even with very limited Spanish skills. But if you haven’t been there you might not understand the daily influence of the ocean to the west, or the dangers of the frequent sugarcane fires. Spend a week with Eagle Paragliding or Jocky Sanderson or the many of other very quality instructional schools and I guarantee you’ll get your money’s worth. Then stay on an extra week and do it on your end and put everything you’ve learned into practice!
Another great way to head off into the unknown is to sign up for a fun competition. Valle De Bravo is one of the most fantastic places to fly in the winter in the world. It’s also a place a lot of pilots have gotten into trouble. The thermals can be strong, there’s a lot of lee side flying, and the famous convergence flying can be terrifically fun, but also make your wing disappear.
A competition eliminates a lot of the typical travelling logistical stresses. You’ve got transport to launch, retrieve support, tons of other great pilots to get information and advice from, and most importantly – plenty of visual cues in the air to help you understand what you’re doing wrong and how you can improve.
My friend Nate Scales said something to me years ago that still makes me smile. “I love where paragliders take you, and I love where paragliders take you.” Every time we step into the air we have no idea where we’re going to end up. And we pack these remarkable travel devices into a backpack and follow them into the unknown with the promise of adventure.
Regardless of where you choose to go and how you choose to do it, my advice is: GO!
