Photographer Felix Wölk leaves the chilled-out lakeside retreat of Pokhara behind and gets too high, too fast in the big mountains of Nepal.
“I recovered consciousness after being on speed in the jungle, then I had a thorn apple for breakfast before some Nepali bush doctor prescribed me colourful pills that made me run back in the woods completely naked. When I met this huge gorilla in the forest I asked him if this story would be a good idea and he said ‘Yes, brother!’” Felix Wölk, September 2009
Paragliding in Nepal. Photo: Felix Wolk
As if he was sitting behind the wheel of a diesel-powered torpedo our bus driver tore down Nepal’s main highway, heading for the setting sun. The words ‘Good luck’ were painted colourfully on the back – a nice wish for those who dared to overtake. We were sitting on the roof, ducking behind our glider bags as tangles of power lines above the road threatened to shave our heads a little too closely. A man climbed up to us: “Person plos loggitch, my friend,” he shouted in my ear. Each person plus luggage. I tried to pay, but the ragged rupee bills were torn into pieces by the headwind.
The bus’s brakes seemed only to grind steel on steel, while overturned car wrecks and rusting signs at the side of the road warned of looming abysses. Later, we came to a halt at the tail end of a traffic jam: a motorcyclist had crashed, gone off the road, and come last in this game of survival of the fittest. We were worried then, when darkness fell and our driver opted to save electricity by thundering on with headlights off. In his opinion the moon shone brightly enough. And indeed, it was unusually full and clear, illuminating the road’s potholes, curves and rocky walls.
At times we stopped at some unknown village, and the noise of the rushing wind was swapped for the sounds of an Asian market, the smell of smoke and spices rising to our eyrie. Others were dark and quiet, victims of power cuts. We took short breaks in these places, but then the horn of our ‘magic bus’ would sound again, and we would resume our rooftop perch, feeling like we were steering a wild UFO beneath unknown stars through a strange land of silver rice paddies and dark, silhouetted mountains. We were heading for Pokhara.
LAZY DAYS
We checked into a rooftop hotel on the lakeside. Together with the room key the hotel manager offered us a bag of hashish the size of which would have surprised even the toughest 1968 hippie; he could have made his living out of it for a year. It looked like Pokhara was Nepal’s chill-out spot number one.
Mornings in Pokhara are quiet, the town seemingly asleep beneath a heavy, dusty jungle air. There is a flying spot close to the lake, but the water shows no movement until a gentle breeze comes up softly in the afternoon. Fishermen don’t bother in the morning either – instead most of them fish for algae which they dry and then feed to their cattle.
Felix Wolk enjoys the local transport in Pokhara
Come the afternoon however and the town stirs, and longtime travellers and hippie-dudes nod “good morning”, even though the clock is well past noon. It’s about then that the lakeside bars show their first signs of life, as a reggae base line or Pink Floyd floats up through the heat.
We spent the first few days discovering the secret flying spots around Pokhara. Bandipur is a soaring site, where warm winds build on their way to Annapurna where they feed the thermals until nightfall. There’s Korchon, which lies at the base of the holy mountain Machapuchare – the 6,993 m summit still untrodden, they say, out of respect for the gods. We flew thermals here, breaking through the inversions to fly above 4,000 m in the Annapurna Massif.
Between these trips we flew our brains out at Sarangkot, the lakeside flying site above Pokhara. This is pure free-flight freedom – there can’t be another place like it on the planet. Here, paragliding means sailing barefoot with warm wind in your hair, getting a drink at the take-off bar and one more right after landing. Two boats drift lazily around the lake, waiting for those who might lose control at low altitude and splash down.
Soon the local Everest beer started to slip down our throats like the town’s waste water runs into the lake. Fun grew with the risk…
