Paragliding

I went paragliding in Medellin 2 days ago. I had been planning to do it for a while because the Lonelyplanet book had told me that Medellin is the center of paragliding in Colombia. Also, Charlote had told me while we were in La Paz that I could do it there. The cost was about $30, which is a steal compared to what we would get charged in the states.

The whole experience took the full day, but the flying itself was about an hour long for me. There was a 2 hour public transportation experience including the metro and the bus both ways. I went with 2 Dutch people and for whatever reason they assigned us all the the same guy, so had to wait for eachother to finish. Also, after we finished jumping, we were quite hungry so we ate at the restaurant up there on top of the hill before we left.

The flight was nice and calm. The wind was quite cold and so I was glad that someone at the hostel had told me to take a long sleeve shirt or jacket. The entire experience was peaceful except for a couple of events:
1. when the paraglider is trying to catch a thermal (circular upward flow of warm air) to get you guys to float upwards higher in the sky and you're looking down at the ground, you start feeling a bit nauseous.
2. in the beginning there was pretty much no communication with the jumper, and so it worried me a little bit but later on realized that there isn't that much to talk about. He does pretty much everything, including the landing. At the end of the flight he just told me to lift my legs and then we basically crash landed on our asses.
3. There was drama concerning my water bottle. I'll describe that one in my next blog post.

And now, here are the pictures:

Strapped in and flying.


Getting untied after the entire flight and crash landing.

Here's what I looked like during flight.

Getting strapped in in the beginning.

Putting on my helmet.