After coming down from the mountain....heroic and hurting (seriously....after carrying that backpack on my hips for two weeks I feel like a twelve year old German Shepherd) we arrived back in the lakeside town of Pokara where we started the day learning how to fly and ended it looking like a Fraggles that had been attacked by Grateful Dead fans carrying spray paint.
By flying....I mean paragliding. Paragliding made me feel like a 3 year old discovering the swings for the first time. You latch yourself in (or your parents do...in this case it was my paragliding instructor), there is very little explanation as to what is going to happen (actually..absolutely no instruction from my tandem rider), you gain some momentum (a push.....or as in the case of paragliding you run like a rabid gazelle off a cliff) and spend the remainder of the ride with your mind in a cocktail of fear, elation, the giggles, and wondering how in god's name you will be able to stop this thing. The ride lasted about a half hour where your eyes dart from the land below, to the other parachutes in the sky, to your own chute--praying all the ropes are made of really, really strong material and don't run into each othe tangling up into a dive bombing mess. It literally takes your breath away though, to see the Annapurna mountain range in the background with the sky speckled with ballooning human birds floating in the thermals next to hawks and vultures. As one can imagine, epic "Planet Earth-esque" music was playing in my head as we flew over the hills. When we got to the lake, however, the soundtrack shifted to Swedish death metal as the instructor asked me if I wanted to try some aerobatics. We cruised over the water (actually...not quite over the water - somewhere between the water and land which was sooooo not cool) and he instructed me to follow all his commands. Throwing my body form side to side we proceeded to start a slow spiral before blending into a gyroscope that caused that mornings Masala Tea to pitch forward to the back of my throat. Just when I though all was lost and we would black out (I've heard pilots do when they hit equally high spinning speeds) we landed with a quick pillowy brake. Not dead. I repeat....we did not die. Yay! After we landed and explored the next level of the sport, parahawking, where you do the same thing with a hawk tied to your wrist to help find the thermals we fly in. Maybe next time.
As we drove back into the city we started to see more and more bikers coming by who appeared to have gotten into severe accidents that caused them to bleed rainbows. Were we witnessing the Carebear armageddon? Not quite, as we saw line after line of children, armed with buckets, waterballoons, and squirt guns fully loaded with multicolor dye. Holi had started. Holi is the yearly color festival in Nepal and India. We heard three different stories of how it was started involving three different gods but we have no clue which one was right. All in all, it's a day to have fun smearing dye, throwing water, and dropping colored powder on your friends and family. It was a bit like Halloween only no candy and the people make your costume for you. It was, universally, fun.
Three hours later we were drenched, painted, and still giggling.
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