What it’s like to go paragliding in Nepal

And why you should lean into your fears

Rajesh is one of the most relaxed people I’ve ever met. Which is good, considering we were about to jump off a mountain together.

While we wait for Oscar nominations to drop (delayed by the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles - no words 💔), I wanted to take this week to share a story that folks have been asking me about, ever since I teased it in a Substack Note last year:

…It’s not every day you put on a harness with a reverse parachute, attached by suspension lines to a wing-like piece of fabric, in the middle of The Himalayas.

You have no engine... No rigid primary structure, like in an airplane... So a paraglider opens the skies to you in a way that can change your perspective.

There’s literally nothing between you and the air currents keeping you afloat.

Let’s rewind to early last November, when I first connected with Rajesh.

He’s the first Nepali paraglider in the country and has been at it for 28 years. At the time of our meeting, visibility wasn’t the best, so I decided to wait for better conditions before committing to a flight. For reasons I can’t explain, I got good vibes from the mountains the night of November 28, so I signed up to fly the next day.

The view from my room the next morning was spectacular.

“You have good intuition,” Rajesh told me. “This is easily the clearest day of the season. The dew was gathering and got heavy enough to settle the dust particles.”

“I guess my Spidey senses were tingling,” I said. He smiled proudly.

Around 11:30, Rajesh ushered me and several others into a van that trundled up to the launch point. Tourists - mostly from India, China, and Nepal - were strapping into tandem paragliders. Occasional gusts of wind caused the wings to billow, signaling the pilots and their passengers to start running, literally off the edge of a cliff.

Step, leap, and soar - I watched them all swoop up into the sky!

Well, for the most part.

One woman stumbled. Her feet dragged, and she pulled herself and the pilot sharply to the left, right into an attendant guiding the launch.

All three went down in a cloud of dust - just short of the dropoff.

Rajesh watched them recover, unfazed. He finished rolling a cigarette and read the sky. “Today even the birds are struggling. We’ll go last. Give the day more time to heat up, so the thermals can penetrate through the inversion, allowing us to fly higher.”

“What possessed you twenty-eight years ago to jump off the side of a mountain?”, I asked. He laughed, took a drag, and answered:

“God.”

Finally, the time came. I was the only tourist still at the launch point.

“Most of these people, unlike you, they’re not in it for the experience,” Rajesh claimed as he helped me adjust my harness - one strap around each of my legs, another around my chest. “They’re in it for the photos. Not very adventurous. Although honestly, the real adventure in Nepal is being on the road, not in the sky.”

He checked the carabiners and tugged at my harness, testing. “A bit unwieldy now, but it’ll be a comfortable seat in the air.” I fitted my helmet and watched Rajesh make sense of the tangle of colored suspension lines attached back to our wing. “It’s basically a kite,” I observed. He agreed: “Yes. One designed to make us fly.”

I could hear the passion in his voice.

He strapped himself in, took up position, and angled us toward the drop-off. “Walk at first,” Rajesh instructed. “Lean forward slightly, but don’t resist the pull of the glider. When I say run, run. And keep running until your feet are off the ground. Okay?”

“Got it,” I confirmed.

My eyes traced our trajectory. I imagined stumbling, pulling us sharply to the left, and catapulting off the side of the mountain.

At least we had a parachute.

“Okay, Michael,” came Rajesh’s voice, snapping me back to the moment. “Ready?”

“Let’s go,” I said.

“The wind’s picked up. Start walking.”

I did - toward the drop-off, heart racing.

“Good. Now run. Run. Run!”

…Forward, until suddenly my feet weren’t finding the ground, and we soared up over the tops of trees clinging to the slopes, bringing Phewa Lake into view!

“I’ll ride this bubble,” Rajesh explained. “The thermal should take us higher.”

It did.

We circled, gaining in altitude surprisingly quickly. The launch point shrunk into a tiny patchwork of sandbags and limp paraglider wings.

I surveyed the ridge below, including a temple at the very top, poised like a crown - and beyond, unbelievably clear, the magnificent Annapurna Range.

You haven’t seen The Himalayas until you’ve seen them from the sky.

I watched wisps of cloud gather around the peaks.

A tiny red plane soared above us, away from the mountains, engine purring.

“These conditions are perfect,” Rajesh called out, thrilled. “The currents, smooth as cream. We can ride this at one-point-five meters a second. In February and March, it’s not this steady, sometimes you’re at five meters a second and you struggle a little bit. But this…” The wind whistled in my ears. “This is like cream.”

I listened to our wing flap in the wind like a sail.

My peripheral vision registered Rajesh steering - pulling left, then right, then left - riding the thermal higher. “Today you’re my copilot,” he said. “When we turn, lean into it, okay?” We arced left, so I angled left. “Yes! Exactly. You get it. Now… Fly with me.”

The wind lifted us. We hit a steady current, and he handed me a GoPro:

“I’ve kept you waiting all these days,” he half-joked. “We better make the ride damn good.” He pointed us toward a distant yellow paraglider, bouncing from bubble to bubble to get there, circling again to make the climb... The BEEP-BEEP-BEEP of our variometer told me we were brushing up against the 2000 meter altitude limit.

I gulped.

“What was it like, your first flight?”

He laughed. “Such a mix of emotions. I wanted to shit my pants. But I was elated. That moment you leave the ground, that moment of being airborne… I still remember it so clearly. You leave everything behind.”

I lifted my knees to sink back into the harness. I could feel myself relaxing into the fact of our flight, starting to trust the glider, although it was impossibly light.

Rajesh told me about flying cross-country with friends, sometimes at 5000 meters, sometimes for five hours at a time: “I really had to pee!”

He scanned the skies for signs of thermals. “We’re the only ones up here, now - unless you count the birds.” Rajesh signaled with his foot, and I looked out just as a Himalayan griffon sped past us. Its white-streaked wings flapped as if in slow motion.

“It’s the same principle that keeps us afloat,” he said with reverence.

I was vaguely aware that we were well past the 20 minutes of flight time I’d paid for, but Rajesh didn’t seem to mind… He was having as much fun as I was.

Eventually, we turned away from the mountains, into the wind to begin a steady descent. Two paragliders appeared around a bend far, far below us.

“They don’t know how to get all the way up here,” Rajesh observed. “For many, piloting, this is just a job. They’re in it for the money. And that’s a tragedy. It’s so important to find that balance between work and passion. And to prevent your passion from feeling like work, you have to find ways to keep it fresh.”

“How do you do that?”

“You fly for yourself. You chart your own course and keep pushing.”

I thought about that.

“Do you like roller coasters?”, he asked.

“Roller coasters? I mean, it’s been a minute, but… Yeah?”

With that, we fell into a controlled spiral.

A moment of freefall hit us… Of what felt to me like zero gravity at the crest of every violently swooping turn. The horizon spun in front of me like the needle of a broken compass. I felt myself start to blackout as we embraced the tailspin.

The wind screamed in my ears, and I screamed in Rajesh’s.

It was extraordinary, seeing the ground somehow above me, realizing we were very nearly upside down, diving toward land:

Rajesh expertly pulled us out of it, and the landing site swung into view. “Stand up in the harness and run as we touch down,” he said.

…It was a simple, soft return to the earth. I felt the wind abandon our wing and collapse behind us like a deflating balloon.

In that moment, all I wanted was to be back up in the sky…

I met Rajesh’s eyes and found in them a glint of understanding. He pulled me into a hug. “Next time, we’ll launch from two thousand meters,” he said.

I’m a far cry from Tom Cruise, sadly -

- but seriously, the older I get, the less risk averse I become.

Paragliding was a big one for me, because even though rock climbing is my favorite sport, I’m a bit wary of heights. So this was an opportunity to face my fear.

The other day, I bumped into an Austrian paraglider who told me about her favorite pastime: Climbing in the Alps, then jumping off the peak she just crested.

I’ve got my work cut out for me. 😎

I’m not sure what’s next - flying off an Alpine summit? - but I’m realizing that the more I lean into the fear, the bigger the world becomes.