I believe I can fly: Paragliding in Cusco

So when we last spoke, Jarrod, I’d just completed the Inca Trail. 44km of hilly terrain and no showers for four whole days. I’m sporting greasy hair, clammy skin, and stinky clothes. I also fall asleep on the train back to Ollantaytambo, with my head lolling to one side and my mouth hanging wide open, so I look like a stroke victim or Voldemort, depending on your angle. Now what, you may be asking, could possibly make this picture hotter?

Delayed onset muscle soreness. That’s what. That punitive, cretinous little friend who shows up 24 hours after you cease exercise to tell you that you really should have prepared better. My quads, my calves, my gluts, my hammies they’re all screaming at me. A bitchy, muscular chorus. I make sexy grunty noises when I go down stairs. Noises usually reserved for 90 year old patients, riddled with arthritis, who take 5 or 6 attempts to get up from a low couch. Ungh. Owww. Arrgghh. Urgh. Mmnph. Oooff. I know… I’m going to stop, because I’ve probably already made some readers slightly aroused.

So when it comes time to choose an optional activity in Cusco, and I’m told paragliding basically involves sitting in a harness while an expert does all the work to make you fly, I am SOLD. The more passive the better, that’s my motto. If getting hooked up to an iron lung was a listed option, I’d sign right on up for that.

We’re picked up early in the morning by the chief paraglider. He’s wearing a goose down vest, aviator sunglasses and cargo pants. Superficial being that I am, I’m disproportionally reassured by his ensemble. Show me a guy in aviator sunglasses and I’m pretty much ready to leap into his arms crying “yes, based on your protective eyewear you seem to know stuff about flying, so LET’S GO DEFY GRAVITY!”

It’s roughly an hours drive to the launch point, which is up the top of a small mountain. Which equals windy, windy roads, and hairpin bends. Which, for me, equals savage motion sickness. Truly, I have to take roundabouts at careful speed or my mouth gets dry and I really have to focus on my breathing. We’re also warned that there’s  no guarantee we’ll actually get to paraglide after all this, because it’s all dependent on the thermal winds being just right. Fabulous. So my optional activity in Cusco may well amount to a Really Long Drive With A Chuck By The Side Of The Road.

Anyway, en route we encounter what I can only assume is a funeral procession rehearsal congratulatory street parade, to wish us a safe flight. How sweet!

Ceremonial ‘All The Best, Gringos!” dance

We get to the top of the mountain, and my breakfast is still triumphantly ensconced in my stomach where it belongs. But before we can take in the beautiful view before us, the waivers are produced and boy, they are long. Ridiculously, ‘ugh, I can’t be bothered reading all this shit’ long. Death, blah blah, permanent inury, blah blah blah. Can’t be certain, but I’m pretty sure I even saw a disclaimer that “the agency cannot be held responsible for drunken text messages sent to ex boyfriends at 3am by the signee.” (Damn it).

Signed off that if I splatter onto this lovely canvas I hold nobody accountable

So we sign our lives away and the waiting game begins. The pilots (is that what you call them?), they set up the chutes so that we’re ready to go when the winds are perfect and I’m briefly anxious. The contents of this tiny little back pack with coloured string are going to support us?

Why yes, I DO have faith in a pink daypack with pretty strings.

I’m pretty sure I made friendship bracelets in high school out of similar coloured twine. Pushing reservations aside, I don my helmet and harness and there’s much clipping and strap tightening etc. and pretty soon I’m Flight Ready. Because of the straps between your legs, it’s basically impossible to walk in this thing without a massive swagger in your step. I feel like a character out of Top Gun. That, or a lady wearing a 1980’s bulky sanitary napkin. Same same.

Stopped swaggering about in slo-motion briefly, for this picture

Instruction time: I’m told by my pilot that he’ll be clipped to me and that when the winds are just right, he’ll tell me to start walking or maybe even running towards the edge of the mountain and I’m NOT to stop, and I’m NOT to lean back or sit down in the harness. Running? I tell him that we just finished the Inca Trail yesterday and frankly, running isn’t really a realistic prospect, but that if he’s after a debilitated shuffle with painstaking moans, I can nail that. He does not chuckle. Take off is no laughing matter, apparently.

Running towards the edge of a mountain top and not stopping feels very counterintuitive. I keep half imagining us getting a few feet off the edge, and pausing a few seconds in the air-like Wil-E-Coyote does when he realises there’s no ground beneath him. Cue deathly plummet with whistly comic sound effect.

We start waiting. Waiting. Waiting and studying the state of the art wind monitoring apparatus. Aka a piece of toilet paper on a stick. Sigh. How long has it beeeeeeen? Oh, six minutes. Okay.

Low Tech, and weirdly appropriate seeing as I am SHIT SCARED

Just gruelling, really

The Wind Whisperer

And then it’s time. Conditions are perfect, says Aviator Sunnies. We’re clipped together and the chute billows up behind us with a satisfying “whoomp.”  I’m instructed to run forward TOWARDS THE MASSIVE VOID IN FRONT OF me.

It’s actually not as terrifying as I was anticipating, because you can feel the pull of the chute behind you, so you know it has your back. I run and stay upright like a champion and don’t sit till the pilot tells me to relax and sit back in the harness.

What comes next? Oh just about twenty minutes of soaring around in the sky with the pilot catching the thermal winds to take you higher, dip back down and then coast back up again. It’s positively delicious. Apologies, but the next series of photos are just unrelenting Holiday Smug.

The view from where I sit

Return to ground zero is interesting. We’re told that if the winds are right, we’ll just cruise back to our starting point but that wasn’t to be. My pilot points out a farm field down below and says “see that field there? That’s where we’re going to come down.” Had I the capability to rotate my head a full 180 degrees I would have given him an incredulous look. That one? The field…..with all the sheep and the cows? Yes, that one.

I tell him I’ll tip him $100 if he can get us to land smack bang on the back of the bull. Either he ignores me and doesn’t even try, or he’s not up to the task, we’ll never know, but we land about 6 metres away from a very nonplussed bull. I don’t know why people go on about “like a red rag to a bull” because as far as I can gather, it doesn’t elicit much more than an eye roll and a fairly deliberate turn away from you.

Whatever, bitch.

The landing is pretty easy stuff, Aviator Sunnies tells me I just need to lean back, lift my legs in the air and keep them up. I say “ha! THAT I can do!!” and what I mean is that I only need to use my hip flexors for that, and they’re not suffering post Inca Trail… but the minute the words are out of my mouth, I’m aware that it sounds kind of sleazy and so for the rest of the day I basically cannot look him in the eye.

My friend Tin, coming in for a textbook legs up landing

Thud!

That’s an awkward note to finish on isn’t it? Anyway, Paragliding in Peru was completely amazing, totally safe, and I’d recommend it to anyone-but I’m trying to sell it to you. Jarrod, Would You Go There?

Team Paraglide!