La Réunion

M's mom, D, and I went paragliding! That's me and my monitor, Lionel, below. Unfortunately it was a cloudy morning so the pictures aren't that great. An interesting thing about all of these new adventure-type experiences I had on La Réunion was that I never quite knew what I was doing or about to do at any given time, since everything was constantly being explained to me in French, usually by multiple people all speaking quickly at me at the same time, so I could never quite keep up; I just kept nodding my head and pretending not to be nervous. Parargliding in French is called le parapente, and I had no idea what that was when M's parents told me I was going to do it. I first pictured something like being pulled behind a boat, but then I heard something about a mountain, and something about jumping off — holy shit! I thought that meant I'd have to jump off of a cliff, bungee-style, and open a parachute on the way down, or something insane like that. It turns out you just jog down a steep incline on top of the mountain with the chute already open, and the wind lifts you up very gently, and you sail down to the beach.

Man, that fisheye lens ain't doin' us no favors. Anyway, when I went skydiving a long time ago, there was a lot to learn before the jump, even though it was a tandem jump and the instructor guy did all the real work. With paragliding, they just shoved us into a van, drove us up the mountain, strapped us in, and told us to run for it. It was really easy, and not nearly as scary as I'd expected; once you're in the air, there's nothing scary at all, but not knowing what to expect during the running and taking off part was a little bit scary in itself.

Here's D and me just before the jump. We're up on the mountain, on the tiny runway thing. Here we'll get strapped to our monitors, who are strapped to their paraglider things, and we'll jog downhill until the air lifts us off. We'll be landing on a beach down below, straight ahead.

That red thing is another paraglider below us! Lionel lined us up vertically for a couple cool MySpace-style shots.

Whales are spotted pretty often by the paragliders, and there were some really cool photos of that in the office, but unfortunately we didn't see any this time.

That's me in the center, on top of that other paraglider like I explained above. I should mention there were a few cameras involved here; Lionel had a camera with him, and I gave my camera to M down on the beach before D and I headed up the mountain, so she could take some pictures of us approaching the beach and landing.

That's me! The rest are all me!

Here we're way out over the water; the descent is so slow we had plenty of time to glide around and look at things before landing.

Landing was pretty amazing. We swept in toward the beach over the trees, and to me it seemed like we were very close to the trees and coming in very fast, and I was a little nervous; I thought we'd come in very horizontally and have to hit the ground running. And then just as we got near the sand and I was getting ready to run, Lionel put the brakes on and set us down completely gently and vertically, like stepping off of a curb.

All right! That was cool, and somehow less scary for me than scuba diving and horseback riding (both coming up).

Next: Part 7 — Horseback riding