Queenstown December 8-11

I came to Adventure and Party City with the intention of taking another bungy jump off a high bridge, but that hasn't happened yet. Two days were spent with colleagues from Griffith Uni taking a brief holiday after the conference - main activities: drinking, eating, drinking, bonding, slandering previous heads-of-department, current deans, pro-vice-chancellors and associated sociopaths, and drinking. Worth doing.

Now I've converted an Introduction to Paragliding day into a full course! The Intro day was exhausting. And painful. The day involves learning how to make a safe takeoff, and a relatively safe landing. Takeoff involves racing downhill as fast as you can trying to imitate an angry goose - chest and head down, arms stretched out high behind your back holding on to the glider controls. The result usually is to pull the glider in front of you so that it pulls you over onto your face, or lower one hand/control just slightly so the wing moves suddenly to one side and lifts/pulls you over like a judo throw so you trip and tumble. Eventually you get it right, and like all things that require practice it seems to be quite natural, and you leave the ground. This is when you start to learn how to land. With the beginners' hill you're never more than a metre off the ground so landing is really about just continuing to run fiercely downhill. As you improve you move to the higher steeper training hill and you glide further and then learn that landing is about using the controls/breaks properly so that you don't continue to land face first. Helmets are good. With each learning experience you get the opportunity to contemplate how improvement can be made as you gather up the glider and the lines, very carefully just so, in order not to get them tangled, plus the harness and carry the whole lot back up the hill. The hill is steep to begin with but seems to get higher and steeper as the day goes on. With my final run I had a great takeoff and then landed nicely, then had to carry everything back about 300 metres over boggy ground, long grass and then the hill. I didn't feel like doing much of anything else for the rest of the day.

The second day of gliding was so much easier! I'd been threatened with another practice flight or two but other people wanted to get going so we just went straight up to near the top of Coronet Peak. The launch site is the car-park of the ski resort, about 1000 metres above the valley and about 4 Km from the landing zone where I'd been practicing the day before. Launch can't be done half-heartedly or hesitantly - one has to commit. And the result is exhilarating.

I had three flights from Coronet Peak that day and improved each time. In constant radio contact with either the launch instructor or the landing instructor (well I could hear them, they couldn't hear me) I was talked through basic turning so I can comfortably do 360 degree turns, figure eights, and proper weight balancing and trimming the wing as I went through thermals. It's all about relaxing, not trying to fight the wing. Thrilling.

No flying today. After driving around to two different launch sites the day was cancelled because of poor wind conditions. My course is interrupted for a day but the paragliding business is hurt too. The company's bread & butter is tandem flights for Queenstown tourists. Ten bookings had to be cancelled today - about $2000.

Hopefully I'll be able to complete my course in the next two days. Time is running out before I have to head for Christchurch and then home to Brisbane.

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