Taking chances
Once, when Miriam and I were coming back from a trip to the bead market at Koforidua, the lush, colonial capital of the central region that’s set high up in the mountains and studded with tall, spindly trees, I looked over the edge of the winding ridge of the road and noticed a huge kite. Turns out there was someone strapped into that kite and they were gently but determinedly riding air patterns up and down the cliff-face in a sport known as “paragliding.”
I think people react to Africa in one of two ways: the risk it takes to come here and live here – and really live here, soak up the culture and take part in the daily madness and frenzy that is African life -- either opens you up like a flower to the possibilities around you (the main justification for the next crazy adventure or interesting opportunity being, simply, well, I am in Africa) or it causes you to close up like a shell, wrapping yourself in all the things that make you feel protected and safe in an environment that’s challenging enough just doing the day-to-day things without stepping out on any limbs or taking any wild chances.
I fall into that first category, which is probably why, on Sunday afternoon, I found myself at the edge of that cliff face, standing in a harness, hooked onto a guy named Juan and waiting for his signal to simply step off the edge.
I was wearing a brain-bucket and a pair of running shoes on loan from my roommate, Sophie, who is a gorgeous, leggy Norwegian girl with hair down to her waist. She makes friends rather easily with men, including Walter and Juan, who had become fast friends when they found each over the Internet on a site devoted to connecting paragliders. They’re the only two enthusiasts in the country. On Saturday, Sophie spent 40 minutes with Walter floating gently in the air, nipping in and out of clouds and playing with the circling birds. She made it sound easy and amazing.
So there I was, thinking about health insurance, wondering about exactly how quickly I was to run to the edge of the cliff and whether running off a cliff is the sign of mental incompetence my brother needed to declare me incapacitated. While he snapped and secured my harness, Juan, a Mexican/Colombian working at God knows what in Ghana but making serious coin at it, told me that when we launched, we would simply run, leaning forward and putting our weight into it and within a few steps, we would be airborne. Then I simply needed to lean back and the harness would turn into a chair of sorts. Then I could just take it all in.
“What about landing,” I asked. “What do I need to know about that?”
“Well,” he answered, with characteristic glibness, “the thing about paragliding is that launching is optional. You go or you don’t. But landing is mandatory.”
We had driven for two hours out of the city, up into the mountains, then climbed, up up up to a satellite tower perched on the cliffs between Koforidua and Kumasi. Walter, who builds these towers, had discovered this spot a few years earlier and had returned, often, with a machete to clear the land. He'd lined it with sandbags to make sure that heavy rains didn’t wash away the launch strip.
As we pulled into the launch, Juan turned to Walter and asked, “So remind me, how do I use the brake? I mean, how do we get back to the ground?” My eyes widened slightly, thinking about stepping off a cliff with someone who had done this only once or twice before. Walter responded that this particular glider hadn’t come with a brake. They’d ordered it off e-Bay, he explained, and it had been gently used. “They’re joking,” Sophie said.
Juan and Walter are both licensed pilots and licensed paragliding instructors. Walter refers reverently to paragliding as “aviation.” Juan, who is not quite so serious, once worked full-time doing tandem launches and lessons. He’d seen a poster with a paraglider on it 11 years earlier and declared: I wanted to learn how to do that. About the only poster that’s ever produced that kind of reaction from me is one of people lying on a white beach.
We waited for a breeze and Juan counted down. I moved forward and was immediately pulled back. I was shocked at how much resistance the kite put up so quickly. I could barely take more than two steps. Our first and second launch didn’t take and apparently it had nothing to do with how I couldn’t move, it had to do with wind power and the laying of the lines. But on the third, suddenly after two steps I could no longer touch the ground.
And then we were suspended out over the edge, looking down on a huge canyon stuffed with green.
When we started, we were about 600 metres up, looking down over a classically Ghanaian town, filled with hawkers and children and tro-tros and winding roads and open sewers. We were high enough up that we could see the rusty, corrugated roofs, but it was difficult to distinguish one type of building from another. In front of us was a huge, empty soccer pitch.
It’s difficult to describe how the landscape changes when you’re directly on top of it, when there’s nothing between you and it but your shoes. Juan shifted and suddenly I was leaning back. I couldn’t tell what he was doing back there, in terms of how he was controlling the paraglider, but he was wearing a kind of monitor that measured air currents and emitted a fast-paced beep whenever we’d hit a thermal, which would push us further up up up.
He decided to glide us over to where there were a couple hawks circling. The birds are the best guide for a paraglider, as they’re trying to do exactly what we’re doing: ride the air currents higher and further. But soon they were flying over to us and the little doo-hickey was beeping like crazy and we were, in a blink, 1,200 metres in the air, soaring high above where we’d launched and able to see way over the hills, the cliffs and into the distance. The town turned into a speck and they only discernible thing was the soccer pitch.
Roughly five minutes into the journey, I started to feel queasy. I found it hard to look down, like my perspective was all wrong. I felt cross-eyed. Looking down is like looking down at a landscaping plan, where all the trees are perfectly round. Juan kept us moving and kept talking here and there. I was just concentrating on not throwing up.
About 20 minutes into it, behind the launch had turned slate grey with a massive cloud that looked like rain. That was our cue to leave. Juan angled us toward the ground and we swirled toward the soccer pitch like a maple key caught in the wind. As we came in closer and closer, Juan told me we would either land and try to run to keep pace with glider, or if we were coming in too quickly, merely slide on our bums.
We slid.
By the time we came to a rest, I was shaking and sweating as though all the water in my body was doing an evacuation drill. That’s when Juan told me that air sickness is the most common first reaction to paragliding – your inner ear can’t handle the perspective, which essentially collapses what we’re used to seeing in 3D – and that he’s had his shoes puked on more times than he can count.
Juan wanted to get the kite packed up quickly, as he’d learned from experience that an audience of Ghanaian children makes it almost impossible and can sometimes lead to damage to the kite. We were locked inside the soccer pitch, so the only people who came to investigate were the caretakers. Neither of them spoke very good English and my Twi couldn’t keep up, so we weren’t able to tell them what we’d been doing up there. We simply packed up the gear and headed for the pool.
The weather kept changing and changing. By the time we hit the ground, there was a text message from Walter saying it was pouring rain up at the launch. The sun was shining where we landed. We had planned to take a cab back to the launch and send Sophie and Walter out, but they decided instead to drive down and meet us at the hotel for lunch, then see if the weather had improved. About 20 minutes later, it poured rain down at the hotel.
It took about an hour for my stomach to calm down enough that I could put food into it. While we waited, Walter and Juan swapped jokes about how they’d carried dogs, furniture, sometimes packs of beer with them on flights, and horror stories about worst clients and worst accidents. (A friend of Juan’s had died a few weeks earlier when she forgot to check her harness. She was doing a tandem launch with a Spanish reporter at the time and they were about seven minutes into the flight when she slipped out and fell away screaming. The reporter, who had no idea how to steer or land the glider, managed to get it to swing back around to the mountain where they launched and he landed heavily but safely. Apparently he couldn’t speak for several days and had to be kept heavily medicated. No one knows when the instructor realized she wasn’t hooked in properly. That’s when I told them I was also a reporter and was severely disappointed they hadn’t thought to provide me with such a great story.)
By the time we’d finished lunch and headed back up, there were more clouds and we decided to pack it in without Sophie and Walter going out. (Apparently this is just how it goes with paragliding, although Juan and Walter agreed they’d never seen weather change as quickly as it does in the mountains in Ghana.)
I think people react to Africa in one of two ways: the risk it takes to come here and live here – and really live here, soak up the culture and take part in the daily madness and frenzy that is African life -- either opens you up like a flower to the possibilities around you (the main justification for the next crazy adventure or interesting opportunity being, simply, well, I am in Africa) or it causes you to close up like a shell, wrapping yourself in all the things that make you feel protected and safe in an environment that’s challenging enough just doing the day-to-day things without stepping out on any limbs or taking any wild chances.
I fall into that first category, which is probably why, on Sunday afternoon, I found myself at the edge of that cliff face, standing in a harness, hooked onto a guy named Juan and waiting for his signal to simply step off the edge.
I was wearing a brain-bucket and a pair of running shoes on loan from my roommate, Sophie, who is a gorgeous, leggy Norwegian girl with hair down to her waist. She makes friends rather easily with men, including Walter and Juan, who had become fast friends when they found each over the Internet on a site devoted to connecting paragliders. They’re the only two enthusiasts in the country. On Saturday, Sophie spent 40 minutes with Walter floating gently in the air, nipping in and out of clouds and playing with the circling birds. She made it sound easy and amazing.
So there I was, thinking about health insurance, wondering about exactly how quickly I was to run to the edge of the cliff and whether running off a cliff is the sign of mental incompetence my brother needed to declare me incapacitated. While he snapped and secured my harness, Juan, a Mexican/Colombian working at God knows what in Ghana but making serious coin at it, told me that when we launched, we would simply run, leaning forward and putting our weight into it and within a few steps, we would be airborne. Then I simply needed to lean back and the harness would turn into a chair of sorts. Then I could just take it all in.
“What about landing,” I asked. “What do I need to know about that?”
“Well,” he answered, with characteristic glibness, “the thing about paragliding is that launching is optional. You go or you don’t. But landing is mandatory.”
We had driven for two hours out of the city, up into the mountains, then climbed, up up up to a satellite tower perched on the cliffs between Koforidua and Kumasi. Walter, who builds these towers, had discovered this spot a few years earlier and had returned, often, with a machete to clear the land. He'd lined it with sandbags to make sure that heavy rains didn’t wash away the launch strip.
As we pulled into the launch, Juan turned to Walter and asked, “So remind me, how do I use the brake? I mean, how do we get back to the ground?” My eyes widened slightly, thinking about stepping off a cliff with someone who had done this only once or twice before. Walter responded that this particular glider hadn’t come with a brake. They’d ordered it off e-Bay, he explained, and it had been gently used. “They’re joking,” Sophie said.
Juan and Walter are both licensed pilots and licensed paragliding instructors. Walter refers reverently to paragliding as “aviation.” Juan, who is not quite so serious, once worked full-time doing tandem launches and lessons. He’d seen a poster with a paraglider on it 11 years earlier and declared: I wanted to learn how to do that. About the only poster that’s ever produced that kind of reaction from me is one of people lying on a white beach.
We waited for a breeze and Juan counted down. I moved forward and was immediately pulled back. I was shocked at how much resistance the kite put up so quickly. I could barely take more than two steps. Our first and second launch didn’t take and apparently it had nothing to do with how I couldn’t move, it had to do with wind power and the laying of the lines. But on the third, suddenly after two steps I could no longer touch the ground.
And then we were suspended out over the edge, looking down on a huge canyon stuffed with green.
When we started, we were about 600 metres up, looking down over a classically Ghanaian town, filled with hawkers and children and tro-tros and winding roads and open sewers. We were high enough up that we could see the rusty, corrugated roofs, but it was difficult to distinguish one type of building from another. In front of us was a huge, empty soccer pitch.
It’s difficult to describe how the landscape changes when you’re directly on top of it, when there’s nothing between you and it but your shoes. Juan shifted and suddenly I was leaning back. I couldn’t tell what he was doing back there, in terms of how he was controlling the paraglider, but he was wearing a kind of monitor that measured air currents and emitted a fast-paced beep whenever we’d hit a thermal, which would push us further up up up.
He decided to glide us over to where there were a couple hawks circling. The birds are the best guide for a paraglider, as they’re trying to do exactly what we’re doing: ride the air currents higher and further. But soon they were flying over to us and the little doo-hickey was beeping like crazy and we were, in a blink, 1,200 metres in the air, soaring high above where we’d launched and able to see way over the hills, the cliffs and into the distance. The town turned into a speck and they only discernible thing was the soccer pitch.
Roughly five minutes into the journey, I started to feel queasy. I found it hard to look down, like my perspective was all wrong. I felt cross-eyed. Looking down is like looking down at a landscaping plan, where all the trees are perfectly round. Juan kept us moving and kept talking here and there. I was just concentrating on not throwing up.
About 20 minutes into it, behind the launch had turned slate grey with a massive cloud that looked like rain. That was our cue to leave. Juan angled us toward the ground and we swirled toward the soccer pitch like a maple key caught in the wind. As we came in closer and closer, Juan told me we would either land and try to run to keep pace with glider, or if we were coming in too quickly, merely slide on our bums.
We slid.
By the time we came to a rest, I was shaking and sweating as though all the water in my body was doing an evacuation drill. That’s when Juan told me that air sickness is the most common first reaction to paragliding – your inner ear can’t handle the perspective, which essentially collapses what we’re used to seeing in 3D – and that he’s had his shoes puked on more times than he can count.
Juan wanted to get the kite packed up quickly, as he’d learned from experience that an audience of Ghanaian children makes it almost impossible and can sometimes lead to damage to the kite. We were locked inside the soccer pitch, so the only people who came to investigate were the caretakers. Neither of them spoke very good English and my Twi couldn’t keep up, so we weren’t able to tell them what we’d been doing up there. We simply packed up the gear and headed for the pool.
The weather kept changing and changing. By the time we hit the ground, there was a text message from Walter saying it was pouring rain up at the launch. The sun was shining where we landed. We had planned to take a cab back to the launch and send Sophie and Walter out, but they decided instead to drive down and meet us at the hotel for lunch, then see if the weather had improved. About 20 minutes later, it poured rain down at the hotel.
It took about an hour for my stomach to calm down enough that I could put food into it. While we waited, Walter and Juan swapped jokes about how they’d carried dogs, furniture, sometimes packs of beer with them on flights, and horror stories about worst clients and worst accidents. (A friend of Juan’s had died a few weeks earlier when she forgot to check her harness. She was doing a tandem launch with a Spanish reporter at the time and they were about seven minutes into the flight when she slipped out and fell away screaming. The reporter, who had no idea how to steer or land the glider, managed to get it to swing back around to the mountain where they launched and he landed heavily but safely. Apparently he couldn’t speak for several days and had to be kept heavily medicated. No one knows when the instructor realized she wasn’t hooked in properly. That’s when I told them I was also a reporter and was severely disappointed they hadn’t thought to provide me with such a great story.)
By the time we’d finished lunch and headed back up, there were more clouds and we decided to pack it in without Sophie and Walter going out. (Apparently this is just how it goes with paragliding, although Juan and Walter agreed they’d never seen weather change as quickly as it does in the mountains in Ghana.)
posted by Palmer in Africa at 3:00 AM
1 Comments:
Karen, my name is Heather Gray, a medical educator from Fort Lauderdale, FL. You have a fantastic blog. Karen, I am trying to help 3 young refugees from Liberia who fled when their parents were murdered and home burned in 2003. They are now in a spontaneous camp in Dakar, trying to get assistance from UNHCR. I have been in regular communication with Ms. Arsac at the UNHCR office there for 6 weeks, trying to help the boys. She said that without refugee status from the Senegalese Commission, the UNHCR cannot help them. This notorious and persistent obstacle to the legitimate refugees seems insurmountable. I had the Office of the President of Save the Children send a letter, asking that these cases be expedited, with no response. Is there anything you can think of to do that might help these boys, and so many others who are in this limbo? Ms. Arsac thinks that their best option is to return home, which the boys tell me would be dangerous, given the tribal unrest still in play. The oldest brother of the three I am trying to help is named Maliki Kroumah, and has done an enormous amount of legwork to get me the names, addresses, emails, etc., of the powers that be, there. However, we seem to be at a standstill, due to the problem with the Senegalese Commission for National Eligibility. One obstacle is that Maliki and his brothers do not speak French, and the commission operates in French. It has been impossible for them to make a cogent case, and they have not been supplied with an interpreter: something Ms. Arsac said is critical. They are being told to write a letter to the President of Senegal to ask for review. This seems a preposterous response, with absolutely no chance of success. Do you have any ideas, or could you perhaps make contact with Maliki to see if there is anything you might do, the media might do, etc? Please reply to me at laserbabe57@hotmail.com. I am working in Southern Brazil now, and currently have regular access to email. Thank you so much, and keep up the good work!
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