Sirkot expedition

My last major trip in Nepal was to Paraglide from Sirkot. I had a brief respite from the air to paddle the normal section of the Marsyandhi in lower water. It was good to note that although the damn has now been closed... there is still enough water to do the lower section! There has only really been one rapid lost.

Sirkot was cool, although I managed to turn up late to leave (I usually wake at 6am - not this time), there were lots of my new friends from Blue Sky Paragliding there. Kayla and Johnny from NZ being two of them. Guillaume also managed to get his wing in time and came along. There was a whole other mix of folk too.

The journey up was, well for want of a better description, bone-shaking. Although we had around 3 hours on the road (remember these are Nepali roads....) we then had to endure another 3 hours on a 4x4 trail. All this crammed into the back of a delapidated jeep, army style. I had the added pleasure of a huge gas cylinder between my legs. I have to admit that looking at the random grimaces of pain from those that hadn't visited back country Nepal before did put a smile on my face. Evil I know, but I've kinda got used to being battered around the place.

Once at Sirkot (a large cone shaped hill at around 2000m) we were greeted by a thousand curious kids and tremendous views. As we set up camp, some folk took a late afternoon flight and I helped get water and wood with our Nepali guides/ my friends Bhoudhi and Babu. On the way back I bumped into my instructor, Patrick, the owner of Blue Sky, David Arufat (ex Acrobatic world champion) and a couple of the other clients. They were off caving and I decided to join them, even though the only torch I had was a little LED at the base of my lighter. The caves were fantastic, we squeezed through holes and crawled through passages underground for over 2 hours. At one point we found ourselves in a cavern where bats roosted (not sure if that's the right word). They were only little bats, but we could get our noses to within centimetres of them and some were huddled in groups of 5 or more. Very cool. David had explored these caves before and is certain that if he can find a way down to the lower levels there will be a huge cavern. I believe him, they seem to go on forever.

Eventually we emerged, blinking and covered in muck, into the evening light. We headed back up to camp for dinner in the dark. I was reminded that crazy paragliders also make mental 4x4 drivers. Dinner was the usual genius combination of wonderful soup followed up by enormous amounts of Daal Bhat and wild pig. A bunch of Babu's special warmed rum punch lubricated and heated our evening by the fire. Mad stories were delivered by Setou, who turned out to be a film comedian of Nepali fame. His transformations of character were quite incredible and occasionally eerie by the fire-light.

The next morning delivered the sun-rise of champions. Once again a low level valley cloud underpinned the scene, as the sunlight slowly made it's way up through it's many hues and painted the himalayas. Quite breathtaking.

I snapped as many pictures as I could and then sat down to absorb the day breaking and let it envelope me as the others stirred. A large and late breakfast then set us up ready for the flight.

We had a briefing of our flight plan from David and then waited for the conditions to become right. The thermals rising up off the hillsides ready to lift us into the air were an indication it was time to go... Although my flight was fun, I didn't manage to get over into the next valleys. Some of the experienced pilots managed to make it all the way back to Pokhara. I landed in a large field and was soon joined by the other new starts. I then spent the next couple of hours on the radio trying to track down the other pilots that hadn't made it as far as Pokhara, picking them up in the van with our Nepali driver. Eventually we collected all those that hadn't made it and headed back to Pokhara ourselves. I opted for a large evening meal of steak with Johnny, Kayla, Guillaume and Patrick. I'm fairly sure there was probably some beer involved too....