Annecey, Iquique, Olduniz, Point of the Mountain- exotic names that mean nothing to most people. But those involved in free-flying anywhere in the world have heard of them and know them as meccas. Also on the list above (located in France, Chile, Turkey, and Utah, respectively) is Pokhara, Nepal, where I'm headed tomorrow.
I've told everyone I am headed there to do some flying, which is true. There are certain places in the world where climate and geography coalesce in to magically reliable swells of gently rising air, outside of which the sport is only a shadow of what is possible.
I'm headed there too for the reason that it is not here, that it is someplace outside of my usual routine where I can more seriously pursue things I want to achieve. Personally, I find myself doing very little flying when I am home in Alaska. Not solely for the fact of less consistent weather but mostly because it takes a decisive step outside of my usual routine to be able to devote time to and focus properly on flying. I'm signed up for an S.I.V course in mid-Feburary, a three day session in which I will work with an instructor to practice emergency flying maneuvers while over a lake.
Paragliding in Nepal is not a new thing. It is in fact possibly the busiest place in Asia for the sport. Paragliding is one of those things that tourists by the dozens do there (usually as tandem passengers). From reading other travelers accounts I confess I am a little intimidated with the idea of dealing with the sky traffic.
I'll have my comically large backpack with flying gear in tow, but what I always seek in travel is less about a particular activity or visiting a list of attractions. My goals lean more towards that elusive "in" that the self-appointed post-tourist like me seeks: to be immersed, to be confused, to be hot, hungry, humid, uncomfortable, surprised, enlightened- to be not seeing what you have come to see, but instead finding what is there (to paraphrase G.K. Chesterton).
I recently received an email full of travel wisdom from Sara, a friend who visited Nepal and India some years ago. She recalled wandering around outside of Pokhara one day and joining a family in a nearby village for dinner one evening, and wrote this to me:
...Her son hung out with us to practice his English while she made us some of the best food I've ever had. The boy wanted to be a teacher there in the village; when we asked him if he ever wanted to travel, he said no. "Why would I go see the world when the whole world wants to come here?" Gesturing at the Annapurna peaks behind him. Maybe he's a teacher now.
I feel that way about Alaska sometimes- why would I go see the world when the whole world wants to come here? But then I am also reassured by another of my favorite writers:
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
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