Annapurna Area Escapades Day 6: "Fear and Flight"

(Disclaimer: Not in Annapurna Area anymore)

October 28th, 2018

I woke up at 6 in the morning with the sound of a faint knocking somewhere in the room. It sounded like rain but not quite. I looked outside my window just to be sure - it was clear outside. The sound continued on for a while; I tried avoiding it as much as I could but the sound wouldn't stop. I realised the source of the sound was from the window on the side of my friend's bed. I drew the curtains open to find a little bird pecking at the glass. And the funny thing is that even after it noticed me noticing it, it didn't stop. It kept on pecking until we decided we couldn't go back to sleep anymore. We didn't have the heart to shoo it away, so we let it do its thing.

We were told that we would be picked up from the hotel at 9:30 am, so we got ready and went out for breakfast at 8:45 am. We went to the same cafe we had gone the previous night and ordered tea and sandwich. It was just after 9 that we got a phone call to inform us that the van had arrived. I wasn't even halfway through my sandwich and my tea had only just arrived. This was a rare moment when in Nepal, something had happened in time, but it was not something I was fond of. They were too early. I hate to be interrupted when I'm eating, I hate it even more when I am rushed into eating quickly. It is one of my biggest pet peeves. I drank the scalding tea begrudgingly before I got up and went to pay the bill.

The van took us to the office where we had to sign some documents, that probably read something like I'm responsible for my decision bla bla bla (I didn't read it, nor I'm sure anyone else did). After the pilots arrived, we departed for Sarangkot. And then the butterflies started.

[..I don't remember what exactly had prompted me to decide that I would go to Pokhara and then jump off a cliff with a stranger on my back. Actually, I hadn't thought about the stranger on my back part at all. I just remember that I had been wanting to do it for a very long time. So when I got the chance, I grabbed it with both hands and very fast. It was expensive because of the peak season and we had to use some connections to make it happen. But we did manage to get ourselves booked for the most convenient time of the day...]

The butterflies started to get aggressive the nearer we got to our destination. In my haste and excitement, I forgot to ask about the experience with the friends who had done it before. I even forgot to check the do's and don't's. I started to wonder if it was too late to back out. Was a refund even possible in the very last hour? Damn it, I should've read that form from earlier. Was it possible for people to have heart failures? Ugh, I didn't do enough research. If I vomit from the sky, I wonder who the unlucky person is going to be?

The van reached Sarangkot at about 10:15. And the take off spot wasn't even at the top of the hill, it was just on the side of the road on a cliff. Of course we didn't get to start right away. We had to look at people taking the leap from a steep hillside one after another. Gosh, was it safe? I didn't even check to see if my 'pilot' was certified. What the fuck had I gotten myself into? I'm insane. That was the only explanation.

After a five minutes wait, we got assigned to our pilots. Mine was named Bikal and was very un-talkative. And so was I. Before I could get a bearing of what was happening, he put a helmet on my head and started strapping me to our chute. And while he was doing it, he said, "if I say walk, walk; if I say run, run". And I found that my brain had stopped functioning. I didn't know what walk meant and what run meant. I had to scold myself inwardly to hold it together! What if I ran when he said walk? And while my mind was battling with these two words - walk/run/run/walk, the pilot started walking and in half a second we were flying.

And I was like, that's it?

Let me tell you something about paragliding. All the pictures I have ever seen on paragliding are fancy ass. Everyone I've seen doing it seem to be enjoying it. There's the lake, the greenery and sometimes the mountains (I'm talking about the Pokhara one here) and other paragliders. The flight was supposed to be 30 minutes long. It is defined as an 'adventure sports' that people do for an adrenaline rush and as far as I was concerned, my adrenaline was as dormant as it could be. Sure the view was amazing and I was flying, but that was that. 

The pilot asked me to hold the go pro and told me I was being recorded. And for some reason, I decided to ignore that. I had paid that much money so that I could take the video back home and show people how much I enjoyed myself. But nope. I busied myself trying to get the pilot to speak. I literally didn't know what to expect from the flight but what I wasn't expecting at all was that we would be flying in circles waiting for the 30 minutes to be over. Boring. 

I'm normally an uncommunicative person, especially with someone I haven't met before and someone who was as keen as an indifferent koala. But I had to pass my bloody time. I coaxed some paragliding information out of him. He said the next world cup was going to be held in Syangja, Nepal and for a second, I found myself asking myself - there's a football stadium big enough to hold a world cup in Syangja? wait, didn't the world cup happen only recently? Of course, he was talking about paragliding world cup. I'm not the sharpest  tool in the shed sometimes. I was trying to make some conversation and dude was only concerned with making me take my own pictures. And what shitty pictures I've taken. My arms soon got tired and I gave the camera back to him. If you think pictures are so important, go on, take them yourself. And my goodness, look this side, smile, do some poses, open your arms wide, do a peace sign, smile more, look down, look up. 

Soon enough the time was up and we started losing altitude. The landing was on the side of a lake and mostly people did the "adrenaline pumps" on the way what with swirls and dives and stuffs. I told him, please don't because I'd had enough butterflies for the day. The landing was smooth and swift. Now don't get me wrong, the pilot was good at his job, he flew well and tried to answer as many of my queries as he possibly could. And if you're into whooping in the air by yourself, I'm happy for you; if you are good at taking pictures, if you know what to do for the camera, power to you; and if you love the idea of spinning in the air, big congratulations. I enjoyed the experience, enough to want to write about it but I wouldn't go to Pokhara and pay NRS 7,500 to do it again. 

If you found my post unhelpful and discouraging, I'm sorry. Here is a picture of me smiling at the behest of the pilot - 

After getting off the chute upon landing, we spent some time waiting for the van to take us back to the office. We looked at how efficient the packers were after the landing, how well organised their whole routine was. After we were transported to the town, we walked to the lake side from there and spent the entire day doing nothing. Pokhara is a beautiful place but sometimes I wonder if it isn't overhyped. I do not find a lot of interesting things to do there but of course, it could only be me. The adventurous trip came to an abrupt end and it felt so anticlimactic but I guess, one can't have everything at the same time.