so now, after some freaky days in mumbay, i arrived here in kamshed. pushcar, the manager of the local flight schools accomondation, took me the last 12 km on his motorbike. the street is probably the worst in the world.
its got like huge holes init, about evry 20 meters. so this guy was driving the street like mad. accelerating to 120 when there was 200m of nice road, braking down, accelerating...i was so afraid, dudes...but after half the ride
i realized, that the guy know all holes in the street by heart, and i could almost enjoy the rest of the way.
my friend pushcar, the acro motorbike pilot
this district of india is called maharastra. It flashed me with its beautiful landscape. The lakes you see all around are manmade.
its the monsoon water they collect in for use as drinkingwater. the one in front of my tent is only 20 years old. other ones are up to 3000 years old,
pushcar told me. I drank the water for 5 days, thinking it was boild...and didnt get sick. The mountains around look very old, eroded, black rocks.
you find minerals everywhere. the launch is full with little bergkristall (quartz).
india is the country of motorbike fanatics, i guess.
Everytime i go shopping in kamshet, i feel like at a biker festival. every male indian who can afford it in any way has a beatiful new shiny machine.
7 people was the most overloaded bike i saw by now. the indian women sit on it sideways, like they used to do in former times on the horseback.
only the driver needs to wear a helmet by law. nobody does. its the fastest transport at these roads made of holes.
trading with spareparts like horns, sidemirrors and suspension must be a great buisness.
when arrived, i met this norwegian fisherman, doug. hes an old india traveller and paraglider as well. really funny guy.
when i wanted to know, if its possible to bath in the lake, he asked if i can see that thing swimming out there...
i asked. YES; WHAT IS IT??? he: the crockodiles. I: how big are they? he: about 6 meters. i got totally offset, as the local
guys were telling me that the lake got like drinking water quality, and its no problem to swim in it. he was pulling my leg.
it was just water buffalos...
so when i arrived, sanjay came up with the bad news. a dude from his ground course collided with a freeflyer on tower hill
and died on the 4 hour way to the hospital. as this has never happened here before, and police investigations were still running, he decided to stop flying for a unknown time. arrgh! so u can imagine that this really pissed me off!
so i just chilled for a day, and luckyly sanjay came back the other day from police with good news. fly tomorrow! so this was what we did. after a 45minute walk on the hill behind the house, i found a place which is really beautiful
and nice for flying. its like meduno a bit, smooth grass covered hills, with almost no trees on it, a beautiful clifstart, and very laminar soaring conditions and enough space for stressless toplanding. smooth thermals took me up like
200m over the start, just enough for a nice helico ; ), then - before sunset - ill fly back to the house which is 100m
from the lake, do a nice mactwist over the lake and land in the garden.
now, after the fatality this place here is very peaceful, only 3 tourists are here at the moment. on friday 60 people
are sayd to come. maybee this is, because the newspapers in mumbay and pune were full with articles on the paragliding accident.
landed in the water. came out with 35m hight and couldnt resist to make another helico. lead it out after one turn, made a turn of groundspiral, beautifully touched the water with one feet, and unfourtunly - missed the shore for 5 meters. water to my neck. camera wet, glider full with mud. good fun.
after one day drying the cam works again! so happy about this.
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the nirvana dudes cant remember my name, its too long. so they have found a nickname for me: mahrat. i begin to listen up on it. i think its because i have a beard and i am tall, like the native people of maharasthra...but possibly there is a dirty joke behind it which i dont understand. the indians are brilliant in making fun of foreigners. they are smiling that funny way when they see me... i met some other paragliders. 4 guys from austria and one from switzerland. they stay 5min away from my place. the world is small.
look who i found in an old cross country issue...
had the first day at tower hill with brilliant conditions. after waiting 3 hours and watching the voultures and a hanglider soaring, the wind finally got
flyable, and i termaled for the first time with my sonic! lots of nice helicos...unfourtunatly i made a bad mistake. i wanted to turn a lee termal. but i arrived to low
and got into a bad - no - a really bad rotor (30kmh windspeed). as i realised what i was doing, my wing got fully destroyed without any warning. it took more than 100m to recover. a collapse with the sonic is not just a normal collapse: it reversed the glider totally after the nose gets downwind. after this destroyer i was fully in the bloody rotor. tryed to reach the good side of the mountain with speed bar ; ) , and got destroyed the next time. this time with full accelerator...good fun... after that i was pretty scared and decided to leave this place behind and flew away with the wind. landed nicely between some fields and hiked up again. people now call me the crazy austrian whoala..... to get rid of the shock i continued with flying imeadetly and got honoured with the most nice conditions one can possibly imagine. as the sun went down the wind got very laminar, and the termals very big and nice. playing over the start, fly straight out with a slight lift, when arriving over the vally with a nice hight doing some acro to half the hight, fly back to the ridge, arrive with the same hight...when the sun was about disappearing it was still difficult to topland with the sonic, because the lift was so good everywhere. a really exiting day...
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since a week ive been flying till sunset every day...this ridge is so nice for playing around...brilliant laminar soaring wind... slowly im going crazy because of so much flying fun. the 2nd local flying school...temple pilot whoalas they r called...good fun these guys. i saw them anchor launching a studentr at approx. 25km/h windspeed. he went up for 100m over launch at very slight forewardmotion. it was his first flight. it took about 1 hour. all the instructor had to do was telling the guy over radio not to toch the breaks and just head against the wind ... but i guess the conditions are so reliable that these guys know what they r doing...seemed pretty experienced.
im learning my first hindi words...whoala means dude...so im a paragliding whoala...visited a buddhist temple, very strange ritual. you buy some flowers and other stuff, than take your shoes off, make your way throu a labyrinth with the other pilgrims. then at the main altar with a golden buddha statue, there are 2 busy guys, messing around with all the people, you give them the plastik bag with the offerings in it, they fill them in another bag taking something out, giving something other in, change round and finally give you back. u give them some money and they make you a red mark on the forehead...feels a little like the luggage control at the airport...very buerocratic ritual...outside the temple, you find many kripples, begging for money. it is really heavy to be confronted with this enormerous poverty...but somehow even some of the poorest kripples have a smile on their faces...this world here is simply not compareable with the west.
animals everywhere. last night i slept on the terrace and got woken up by a squirill jumping in my face. iv also seen those lizards which can run over water, frogs lots of geckos, all kinds of cows, scorpios 5cm big, flying bugs, as big as sparrows, and at least lots of crows eagles and voultures. feels like in a walt disney movie.
