Wandergliding: Tandem Paragliding with Ajay

May 28th, 2011

A few weeks ago when Manu took me to Solang Valley, the small ski resort and mini-adventure park in the summer, I ran into a world class paragliding pilot, Ajay Kumar, whom I had met in Nepal four years before. This guy has won the Indian Nationals before so despite my recovering back injury I felt safe in going for a tandem flight with him.

I texted him the night before, having just returned from the Bhrigu Lake trek with legs of jelly, and he replied that he would call me at 7am the next morning to see if it’s flyable. 7am! Wow, that’s an early start.

Sure enough, he called me at 7am and I was to meet him on the other side of the bridge from Manali. So I got ready and headed down to the bridge that separates Old Manali from Manali. Normally there are many rickshaws plying for your business but at this time of day, but could I find a rickshaw? Of course not! I began to jog along the road knowing that time was short. It was the first time that I ran since my paragliding accident and I was quite pleasantly surprised that it didn’t hurt at all. I passed a couple of Indians with their metal carriers of massage oil and I recognized one guy, Ram, who had given me a slightly unsolicited massage the week before. I said “Namaste” but I couldn’t help but laugh, with another incident of misplaced Indian sales pitches when a third massage guy faintly offered me a massage as I jogged by! Yeah, a guy running by, early in the morning, not in jogging clothes, must have time for a massage! There’s no way that he’s in a rush!

After a couple of ATM attempts to get some money, I crossed the bridge and waited for only five or ten minutes before a red Toyota barrelled up to my spot on the far side of the span. I hopped in with the other four Indians in the vehicle. Quite quickly I recognized Manu, a tandem pilot that I met back in Goa. We headed towards Snow Point and I was impressed by Ajay’s Formula 1 type driving as we weaved in and out of traffic. As I mentioned in a previous post, I was thwarted with actually reaching Snow Point due to congestion when Pascal, Charlotte and I were on motorbikes. This time, with a combination of driving and hiking, we made it to the “promised land”.

Promised Land? Hmm...if your idea of promised land is comprised of a parking lot of white tourist vehicles, loads of garbage, redundant road side vendors of food and water, many snow curious Indians who make their way to their destination by car, horse, foot and even sadly these small push karts with lazy people getting pushed that just plug up the road. As we rounded one corner I saw what the main attractions were: inner tubes sliding down gentle snow slopes, carved out and decorated heart shapes in snow banks for your romantic photo op, horse rides, ATVing down a creek and short paragliding flights. Many of the vehicles parked at Snow Point doubled as mini-kitchens serving up their veg and non-veg dishes.

The traffic jam into Snow Point:

The insanity of Snow Point:

So many cars...

We ourselves took advantage of one of these make shift kitchens and got a healthy sized breakfast of rice with dal and beans (still not my idea of a breakfast but I needed something to fill my fuel tank). After Ajay made multiple attempts to find a taxi that would take the two of us higher but in the end he used a jeep that the company he works for owns and another guy came with us to drive the truck back down.

The Rohtang Pass still isn’t completely open due to snow higher up and they are trying to fix it up from the spring thaw. We actually reached the barrier preventing vehicles from going any farther but after a quick chat with some guys in a big snow removal tractor, we lifted the gate and headed up. What a bumpy road. I was in the backseat holding on to both handles above the windows and still managed to have my head hit the roof!

Higher up on the Rohtang Pass:

We got out at the takeoff point which really was no more than a steep slope off to the side of the road. We waited for the conditions to improve a bit, analyzing which clouds were creating which shadows and where the lift was going to be. I learned quite a bit from Ajay throughout this flight about thermal flying and also some aspects of tandem flying.

Getting the wing ready:

About to launch:

Soon we were off and began to climb almost immediately. My job as the passenger was to weight shift in the direction that we were turning...pretty easy to do. Of course I also had to snap some pics and I tried to glean as much paragliding knowledge out of this excellent pilot.

We reached cloud base above Snow Point and began to cross over it, skirting along sides of the clouds. We searched for thermals along the ridge heading south and were soon over the area that I had hiked up just four days before on the Bhrigu Lake trek. From the air it looked a lot easier!

In flight:

In the first thermal:

Snow point is now far below:

Looking down the valley towards Manali:

By the clouds:

Getting close to the snowy terrain:

Where we trekked to Bhrigu Lake:

Not happy with the ratty thermals there, Ajay decided to cut to the west, across a valley towards Solang Valley. We lost a fair amount of height getting there and not too much lift was to be found so he opted to go to Solang Valley, our landing zone, with a fair amount of height so we could try a little bit of acrobatics...cool!

He instructed me that I would be told three commands: left, right, centre. I was to fling my body in the appropriate direction so as to help with the acro manoeuvres. We would be trying some big wingovers and asymmetric spirals and who knows what else.

“3, 2, 1...okay left! Now right! Left! Centre!” Ajay yelled out. We began ripping around and I became quite focussed on his commands as I was having a tough time hearing him. I do recall at one point seeing our wing and nothing but ground around it. We weren’t inverted, but not too far from it. Being a bit of an adrenaline junkie, I loved this portion of the flight.

Two happy fliers:

Starting to head across the valley:

We came into land at the crazy gong show of a place, Solang Valley. Crazy because there’s just so much going on...many pilots just learning, many tandems, kids get pulled up in a paraglider by men with ropes below, the zorb balls and then just a whole lot of people just standing around in the best spot to land. You know that if you sit there long enough, you’re bound to see someone screw up and sure enough we saw a tandem pilot wrap his wing around some old ski lift lines. Thankfully he had landed already so no injuries.

On the ground with the post-acro smile: