12. Hey, whitey

Manali, Himachal Pradesh, India

Growing up in NZ I always had a few Indian and Asian classmates. Those that were born in NZ didn’t suffer much discrimination as far as I know, because to us they are Kiwis – they dressed, spoke and acted like the rest of us. So I’ve always been curious to see a white kid who grew up in say Japan or India. Well it’s taken me more than 30 years to find one but here he is, playing football with the locals, on the left. 
 

This kid was born and raised in India to an English father and an Italian mother. He speaks English, Italian and Hindi. Unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to meet him yet, but I’d like to.

11. Living off the land

An interesting friend of Bruce’s I met was Simon, an English gent. He built his house near Manali around ten years ago. It’s a beautiful place with a productive veg garden, but the other interesting thing is that it is completely powered by his own hydro power plant off a creek at the rear of the property.

At the bottom is Simon’s pumphouse. These ancient stone huts line many of the creeks in the region, and a community one can be seen in the background. Inside is a design that hasn’t changed for perhaps thousands of years:

It’s a wheat grinder. Wheat goes into the hopper at the top, the river turns the heavy stone wheel, and flour comes out the bottom. These are still in use by village folk today.

However, Simon’s pumphouse contains this: 

which is enough to power his home, and the excess power generated goes into an underfloor heating system.

10. Around the house

Manali, Himachal Pradesh, India

It’s been a great experience staying with Bhagtu and his family for a week.

A note on Indian furniture:

 
Watching IPL cricket in the lounge - mattresses

 
The dining room – mattresses on the floor again

I don’t know if mattresses on the floor is the norm or just the preference at Bhagtu’s.

The only small negative about staying at Bhagtu’s was dinner time – we’d have to wait until he got home from work before we’d have dinner, and sometimes that wouldn’t be until 9 or 9:30pm. Dinner was always the same – dhal (lentils) on rice. It’s nice, and it really fills you up, but it is a little repetitive. They love it though and eat it for dinner every day, year-round.

Indian beds

Indian beds can be summed up like so: rock hard, short (my feet touch the end), and wide enough for the whole family (cos they’re often two single beds pushed together). What’s quite gross is that when you check into a hotel they will only have a sheet on the mattress itself, and then no top sheet – only blankets. I don’t wear pyjamas and I don’t fancy an itchy woolly blanket on bare skin so I always have to ask for an extra sheet.

09. A note on weed

Manali, Himachal Pradesh, India

Cannabis grows wild almost everywhere in the north of India. Here’s some plants that just happened to be roadside.

Unfortunately for the would-be smoker, there’s so much of it around that the plants are quickly fertilised so not very potent.

The preferred manner of ingesting cannabis is in the form of charas. Charas is made by workers who rub the cannabis plants and then scrape the buildup of resin off the palms of their hands.

Charas has been smoked for thousands of years in India but it was made illegal in the 1980s. It’s still smoked in public though, but only on the low-key. A common local method for public smoking is to remove the tobacco from a cigarette and repack it laced with charas. If you see a group of young guys sitting around, one of them will likely be doing the telltale mixing motions in the palm of his hand. More traditional methods include smoking from a clay chillum pipe.

As for the effects, well it is effective, but it’s not as strong as plain old marijuana back home. And I assume it feels stronger here than it did at sea level, since we're now at altitude. Apparently the best charas comes from around here, Himachal Pradesh.

08. Hangin’ with the locals

Manali, India

So far on this trip I’ve been spending all my time hanging out with Bruce and his friends. He has a lot of local Indian friends and also a bunch of expat friends who’ve been living here for years. Most of his circle is connected with the paragliding scene. Many of the foreigners live in India doing nothing for half the year, and spend the other half of the year doing tandem paragliding for $$ (oops, €€) in Europe.

One afternoon we had a great impromptu drinking and smoking session at a local pizza place. Everyone is always very inviting and pleased to meet me, and if they’re a local almost every time they’ll start going on about how Bruce was the first to paraglide in the region and how he helped so many of them get started, either by teaching them or lending them an old paraglider to train with, or even just by doing it and they learnt from observation and copying him.

Drunken afternoon at a pizza place. The quiet gangsta dude at the back with his sunglasses on was the Mayor

At the end of the session one of the dudes drove us home. “I always drive drunk”, he told us. I guess catching drunk drivers isn’t a priority for the local police.

More hangin’

Near Manali in the village of Vashisht are a bunch of natural hot springs, which Bhagtu offered to take me to one morning. The pools are emptied daily at 3am so the sooner you can get there the cleaner the water is. We arranged to get there at 7am.

Well, it wasn’t what I expected and out of respect for privacy I didn’t take any photos so you’ll have to make do with my description.

There was a separate men’s and women’s bath. It was quite small, only about ten metres square, and crammed inside were dozens of Indian men, all in their underwear. So I stripped down to my boxers and in I went. It was actually quite relaxing, and when an old grey-haired dreadlocked holy man came in for a dip and started chanting it was even more relaxing. It was quite a “this is India” experience.

Outside the hot baths, hot spring water flowed into the street and local village women gathered there to wash their clothes and dishes.

07. Look at me Ma, I’m flying!

Manali, Himachal Pradesh, India

As I write this I’ve finished my sixth day of paragliding training, 5 of them here in Manali.

I’ve been training at the Solang Nala ski-field just north of Manali. In winter time it’s a bit of a ski-field, with one beginner’s slope with a rope tow, and a brand new gondola to the top of the hill (currently under repair due to a freak avalanche). But the area around Manali is great for back country skiing, if you have the energy to walk to the top of the mountains.

A local showed me a photo on his cellphone of the ski field covered in snow just 2 months ago in February. However what greeted us in April was now a dustbowl of a landing area, and dozens of paragliders in the vicinity.

The grass slope in the background is the skifield – that’s all of it. The rope tow is just out of frame to the right.

When Bruce came here in 1988 he was the first ever to paraglide in the region. Back then Solang Nala in summertime was well-grassed, attracted a few tourists as a nice picnic lunch spot, there was a bit of horseback riding in the summer, but not too much tourist activity. Lots of Bollywood productions would shoot there with all the green grass and the snow-covered mountains in the background. Bruce always intended that Solang Nala would remain a paraglider pilot training area, and that actual tourist tandem flights would be taken from nearby mountains much higher. But from what I’ve been told, Indians always go for the cheaper option, so if you offer them a 500 rupee (NZ$15) 1 minute flight at the training ground, versus a 3000 rupee half hour flight from a nearby mountain, they’ll usually go for the 500 rupee option. So now at Solang Nala in the summer it’s still a pilot training ground but the majority of paragliders are tandems taking tourists for one-minute flights. Lame.

Check it out – Zorbs, an NZ invention. Bruce said he once contacted Zorb HQ in NZ about setting up here, and they had all sorts of requirements around space, tourist numbers, revenue, marketing budget, franchise fees, safety, yadda yadda, so he didn’t bother. Sooner or later a local copied the design of a Zorb, got a bunch made in Delhi, and set it up here himself. They still call it Zorbing, and of course he’s not paying Zorb HQ any franchising fees. Well well well, I just found out that Zorb-fakery is quite popular worldwide, and it looks like Zorb NZ didn’t invent the concept either but copied it from a Frenchman. OK, enough about Zorbs.

Lessons 2 and 3

The first couple of days I was mostly practicing ground handling, which is controlling the paraglider while you’re on the ground. The most dangerous part of paragliding is the takeoff and landing, cos that’s when you’re close to the ground and can get slammed, so having good ground handling skills is essential.

I also practiced my forward launches, and got short little hops of flight in.

Most of the time it went OK but I did have the occasional crash:

Run Forrest, run!

Man, I’ve never seen video of myself running before but the above looks pretty funny, with those fast little steps as I try to drive the paraglider up and generate enough speed to get off the ground. Go boy!

Anyway, in this case the paraglider started to deflate on one side so I should have pulled the brakes on the other to catch up with it. Lesson learned!

I also started to attempt the reverse launch, which is where you stand facing backwards and use the wind to get the paraglider above you. But that was frustrating as I couldn’t figure out which strings I needed to pull to correct the paraglider on the way up.

Lesson 4 and 5

I kept battling trying to get the reverse launch figured out, but was getting more and more frustrated. I’d get confused as to which brake line I needed to pull to straighten out the glider, and I kept getting rope burn on my fingers. Bruce suggested a variation on my grip with the A lines in one hand and the Ds in the other and that worked much better for me, so I finally got the hang of the reverse launch which was a victory.

Fitness

I tell you what, it’s a great cardio workout doing the sprint takeoffs, and then walking back up the hill carrying the paraglider. Especially when we’re at 2600m. Bruce likes to tell a story of the pasty English stoner he took on a week long paragliding course. By the end of the week the guy had a decent glow on, and was tanned and fit.

Man, if you had to lose some weight, a paragliding course in India would be the way to go – altitude training, cardio, plus diarrhoea thrown in for good measure (more on that in another post).

Patience

Learning to paraglide in the mountains is an exercise in patience. It’s a lot like learning to surf – first you’re battling the white wash trying to get out the back, then you’re lying there waiting and waiting for the right wave, finally it comes so you paddle and paddle and either miss it and have to turn around, or you catch the wave and barely stand up before falling off.

Here you’re battling walking to the top of the hill carrying your paraglider, unpack it and lay it out on the ground, check for line tangles, strap up your harness and then you’re standing there waiting and waiting for the right breeze. It needs to be a headwind, but not gusting too strong (8-15 km/h). If the conditions are good you won’t wait long but sometimes I’d be waiting 5 or 10 minutes. Finally the wind comes and you start to lift the paraglider over your head but then it twists to the side and crashes into the ground before you even get going. So you lay it out on the ground again, check for tangles again and wait for the right breeze.

On some days we’d only get about 3 hours in before the wind would get too strong and we’d have to call it a day. And on those short days I might only get a handful of launches in – frustrating. But on Day 6 it finally all came together – the wind conditions were good and we were able to get about 6 hours of training in before I was too tired and called it a day.

Lesson 6

With the reverse launch figured out and growing confidence in my ground handling I was able to make some reasonable flights by launching from the slope and getting a bit of air time. So it was time for me to step it up a level and fly from the top takeoff.

Here’s the view from near the top:

and here we go:

Notice I start with the reverse launch, where I’m facing the glider and I use the wind to launch it, instead of doing the Run Forrest run thing I did on the forward launch.

It looks like I’m heading way out to the left over the rope tow and into the trees but I’m not, keep an eye on my shadow on the ground to know where I really am.

Altogether we did 4 takeoffs from the top and I practiced my turns in the air on the way down. Now I need to keep flying to get used to the feel of the glider in the air.

Update: Day 7 was shit, only half an hour of ground handling practice before the wind got too gusty and we called it off. Damn mountains. There’s something to be said for learning the basics near the beach with a constant sea breeze.

06. To Manali

Manali, Himachal Pradesh, India

Bruce decided that I needed a bit more space to move than at the Dhelu training ground so we headed to Manali so that I could train at the Solang Nalu paragliding area. Petie rode in a chartered taxi with our luggage and the paragliders, while Bruce and I rode together on his Enfield 500.

The trip ended up taking 6 hours, with a couple of chai (tea) stops along the way.

We took the back roads there for parts of the trip, and the views were amazing.

Female road workers

The Enfield is fun to ride – a big 500cc single cylinder, so it’s all about the power at low revs, not like the 4 cylinder 250cc I used to ride which redlined at about 19000 rpm. And because the Enfield is so heavy it handles the potholes reasonably well. Like many of the cars in India, the bike is based on 1950s technology yet it’s only a few years old. The design has barely evolved. Unlike most motorbikes the gearshift is on the right foot and the rear brake on the left, which takes some getting used to. It’s like trying to drive a car which has the clutch pedal and the brake pedal swapped – sure, you get the hang of it, but in an emergency you’ll probably instinctively stomp on the wrong pedal.

About the only traffic we’d come across on the back roads was the occasional sheep or goat herd:

Once we arrived in Manali we stayed with Bucktooth, an old friend and business partner of Bruce’s. Actually his name is Bhagtu but in hearing his name in conversation I’d thought it was Bucktooth. I also kept hearing about another friend of Bruce’s who I thought was called Knuckle. Turned out to be Nakul.

Bhagtu is in interesting guy. He’s only a couple of years older than me but he’s already got a number of businesses and has built his own house, something that is quite an accomplishment anywhere but especially here. He’s lived his whole life near Manali so whenever we take a trip into town to visit his adventure sporting goods store, the half hour trip takes double that because of all his stops along the way to chat to the locals. I commented that he knows a lot of people and he said that he always tries to be friendly to people and that he’s well respected around town because of that.

Luxury

Bhagtu’s house is sweet – located amongst picturesque apple trees (Manali is famous for its apples).

It has a hot shower, clothes washing machine, sit down toilet, and a fridge! Bruce’s bachelor pad in Bir had none of the above – no hot water, no fridge, no washing machine, communal squat toilet shared with the neighbours, and to bathe is quite a performance – fill a large 20L plastic bucket with water to the brim, then dangle an electric heating element in said bucket. After about 10 mins give it a stir, cos otherwise the water at the bottom would still be cold. After about 20 mins you’re good to go, so carry the bucket outside into the back yard and scoop water over yourself with a plastic scoop. Best to bathe in your underwear lest the neighbours see (there are no fences).

I got used to this bucket-scoop bathing system when I was in SE Asia a few years ago and it was fine there – the climate was hot enough that a splash of cold water was refreshing, and the water was tepid anyway. But up here in the mountains it’s quite a drag having to heat the water first, and it’s hard to feel hot when you’re wet and exposed to the cool mountain air.

Although Bhagtu’s house has all the mod-cons, it seems that old Indian habits die hard. His wife barely uses the fridge and it’s switched off at the wall. Likewise the electric hot water cylinder – it’s usually switched off at the wall so when you want a shower you need to switch it on 10 mins before. His wife still washes the dishes and some of the clothes outside in a large bucket and still gets hot water from a huge kettle on top of the wood-burning stove. Back home we think nothing of having hot water on tap 24/7.

But they have been perfect hosts and it only just occurred to me that while Bruce and Petie are in the guest room, I am sleeping in Bhagtu’s & his wife’s bed! They are bunking down with their daughter and the wife’s brother on mattresses in the living room. Bruce says they are used to that, and in winter they sleep on mattresses in the living room around the fireplace anyways, but I still feel stink about it. Of course I’d be happy to sleep in the living room but maybe they’d feel weirder having the foreigner sleeping amongst them.