November 12th, 2021
While sitting in Banana’s hostel, I overheard a couple of people
talking about going tandem paragliding so I asked them about the details. I had seen the tall Dutch guy named Raenear the
night before during the big Peru versus Bolivia World Cup qualifying match
which thankfully Peru won 3-0. Raenear,
who pointed out his palindromic name when I asked how he spelt it, suggested I
contact the paragliding company via Instagram.
Both he and his girlfriend Sibel were going to try paragliding for the
first time.
I met up with them and the tandem pilot Fernando at 4:30 pm
at Hotel Rocha, near the entrance to Huacachina. The wind was from the south (although it was
tough to tell down in the oasis so I deferred to Fernando’s knowledge of the
area) so we began hiking up the tall dune behind the hotel which curled around
towards our hostel. It is the dune that
you can see a guy sandboarding down on my last blog post. It was a bit of a slog walking up in the sand
with a paraglider on my back but not too bad.
We reached a shoulder about 2/3 of the way up and Fernando thought we’d
be fine to start from there…nobody disagreed as that meant less climbing.
The wind was fairly strong so I opted to wait and see how
Fernando faired with one of the tandems.
I was a bit surprised when he let Raenear and Sibel decide who would go
first as I would have taken the tall, heavier guy first, considering the
conditions. Sibel wanted to try first so
Fernando pulled out a 2 liter plastic pop bottle and started filling it up with
sand for a little extra ballast. It
seemed like a lot of effort to add only 1-2 kilograms of weight.
Their launch was good and they had no problem staying up. Fernando pushed forward at times in order to
prevent getting blown over the back. I had
already unpacked my wing but decided that it looked a bit strong with thermic gusts
occasionally blasting through. I wouldn’t
be as heavily wing loaded as they were on the tandem. After about 10 minutes they safely landed beside
us and Fernando not surprisingly reported that it was strong so I decided to
wait for the sun to set.
Almost a half hour later, Fernando strapped an excited Raenear
into his harness and I took off just shortly after they did. What a cool site! Ridge soaring by this massive, steep sand dune
while looking down on the oasis below and off to the right at the undulating
sand dunes lit up in the sunset glow was super awesome. At one point, I pretty much flew right over
Banana’s hostel but I was quite sure that no one was looking up.
The conditions were a bit turbulent at times which seemed a
bit odd as the thermic activity had to be tapering off since the sun had set. After about 10 minutes, I hit a good patch of
sink and questioned if I was going to make it over a small ridge at the far end
of the dune, away from the take off, to where I was planning on landing. It was a flat spot where the dune buggies
loitered while waiting for their passengers but thankfully most of them were
somewhere out in the desert for sunset. “Trust
the physics” I thought as I turned back towards the takeoff, assuming that the
wind flowing up the dune would provide some lift…but it didn’t. I just maintained my height for about 50
meters, turned back and decided to not risk it and head straight to the landing
zone.
Approaching the LZ was fine, just a bit of dodging of dune
buggies was required. That was something
new! A few minutes after I landed,
Fernando and Raenear came down about 50 meters away. Raenear loved it just as Sibel had. I packed up my wing and thanked Fernando for
his site briefing and returned for a nice cold one at Banana’s. Sibel and Raenear joined me soon after and we
had a nice evening hanging out at the bar.
Flying a huge sand dune at an oasis…super sweet!
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