Sunday, December 1, 2013
Waygooks Take Flight!
I think I've wanted to jump out of a plane for the last ten years of my life. It almost happened a few years ago, but after what I'll call a case of Divine Intervention, I yielded to the universe's plea to not go through with it. At least not until the time is right. I still haven't given up on that goal.
This past weekend, however, I finally got to experience the thrill of flight through different means: paragliding. Now before I came to Korea, I didn't know anything about the world of paragliding. I'd never seen anybody paraglide and I'd never heard of people talk about it, so it was a completely foreign concept to me. I mean, as a kid, I always remember seeing shows and movies where characters jumped out of a plane--who can forget the classic Full House episode where Uncle Jesse gets stuck in a tree and almost misses his own wedding?--but you never saw anybody go paragliding.
Hoping to check skydiving off my bucket list while in Korea, I kept coming up empty. However, in the process, I did stumble upon the exciting world of paragliding, and I knew I had to do it, winter weather be damned.
And so it was, that Saturday morning, I woke up and thought to myself, "Today is a good day to jump off a mountain"--and it was! The weather was nice and cool and there wasn't a single cloud in the sky.
I got to Lotte Hotel at 9:30 to meet my jumping compatriots, Megan and Kelleen, and our tandem superstar, Mr. Lee. We got in his van and drove off to pick up another fellow, who we initially thought was Mr. Lee's business partner, but turned out to just be a friend and fellow paragliding enthusiast.
During the hour and a half drive to and from the jumping site, we got to know a bit about Mr. Lee while he pointed out points of interest, such as a cable car running up a mountain or a field of honey apple trees. Mr. Lee sported a full head of grey hair under a grey St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap. At 64 years of age, you can tell that 20 years of paragliding have helped keep him young at heart; he had a child-like and contagious grin that he flashed at every opportunity.
He was also very polite and courteous, asking if it was okay if he smoked in the van with the window down, and inquiring as to whether or not we'd eaten breakfast yet. He was even kind enough to ask the girls if they were interested in marrying his 34 year-old and very rich son. "All he cares about is money," he kept on saying with a laugh. How the girls passed on such an offer I'll never know.
We eventually arrived at the landing spot, which was just a small dirt road that went under an overpass. He and the other fellow in the back got out, left us alone in the van, and they started talking to a group of men that were already there waiting when we arrived. The girls and I found it slightly sketchy. Was this all a set up? Were they waiting here to get the drop on us? I mean if I wanted to rob some foreigners and make them disappear, this looked like as good of a place as any. Childhood stories tell us that nothing good ever comes from being under a bridge or overpass.
Thankfully, we were just being paranoid, and the whole gang hopped in the van.
A couple times during the ride, Mr. Lee asked myself and Kelleen if we had a driving licence and if we could drive. We both answers affirmatively, and I figured he was just joking when he said that I was going to drive later on. After all, like I said, Mr. Lee was a laugh riot, so I thought he was just kidding around. However, as we left the landing spot and started making our way towards the mountain, he made a point to map out the directions for me. "Take a left, and then turn left again at the lights," he said. So apparently I was in fact going to drive, though I still didn't understand why.
It turned out that my job was to pick up Mr. Lee and Megan or Kelleen after they jumped so he could drive us back to the top and we could do it all over again. The other guy in the van had nothing to do with our little adventure.
The road up the mountain was steep and winding, with some sharp F1-type turns. The thought of having to drive a bulky van down this treacherous road made me nervous. I just prayed Mr. Lee regularly checked the brakes.
When we got to the top of the mountain and we looked out at the view, that's when shit got real. We unloaded the equipment and made our way to the jump spot. To my surprise, there was a large group of people waiting for their turn to jump. It reminded me of airplanes waiting for their turn to take off from the runway. Watching the first guy take off was so surreal; it was like something out of Super Mario World.
For those who have never seen paragliding before, two or three people stand ten feet or so behind you, holding your canopy. The jumper starts out facing the canopy while holding onto the suspension lines that connect to the canopy, as if holding on to an assortment of balloons, and starts running backwards. Once the canopy inflates, the jumper lets go of the lines, turns around, and starts running for dear life until the end of the runway. Then it's essentially sink or swim.
The takeoff was definitely the scariest part for exactly that reason. First of all, when you're running, you can't look back, so you don't know if your canopy is inflating properly. If you hear people screaming behind you, that's pretty much your only signal to stop running. It happened a couple times right before I was supposed to go, and it made me somewhat weary. You're at the wind's mercy at that point.
Mr. Lee called the group over and held out what looked like an extendable police baton with really good reach, except there was a small go pro camera attached at the end. I figured he wanted to take a group photo in case this was the last time we'd all be seen together and alive.
Even after watching a few takeoffs, though,I still couldn't figure out how the tandem paragliding setup worked. I was chosen as the lucky one to go first in the group, so Mr. Lee suited me up in a NASCAR-looking outfit, knee pads and a helmet, which were totally going to save my life when I plummeted to my death, and a giant backpack that made it look like I either had grown a turtle shell or the saggiest ass in the world. How this was going to keep me from falling prey to the cold, evil claws of gravity, I had no idea.
I stood in front of Mr. Lee and got clipped on to him, my life resting in his hands, and was instructed to run when given the signal. The canopy pulls you in the opposite direction, but you have to keep pumping those legs until you run out of runway.
I honestly don't remember what was going through my mind as I stood waiting for the signal. My emotions fell somewhere between excited and nervous, but fear had definitely left the picture as soon as I was strapped on to Mr. Lee. Somehow, I just knew everything would work out fine.
You know how as a kid, you're always told to look away from the needle when you're getting an injection? I think not being able to see the canopy and whether or not it was inflating properly behind me just put it out of my thoughts. The only thing running through my mind was the word "run" in big bold letters, and that's exactly what I did until I couldn't feel the ground beneath me anymore. With my feet dangling beneath me, Mr. Lee instructed me to sit back. The turtle shell backpack that I was wearing was essentially a car seat. I sat back while Mr. Lee danced and flirted with the winds and I enjoyed the view.
In that initial moment of flight, I was surprised to find that rather than experiencing an adrenaline rush, I was overcome by an unparalleled level of tranquility and serenity that made me laugh uncontrollably. Life was perfect. Directly below me was the very road we had taken to get to the mountain's peak. I admired its beautiful curves and the trees that stood guard along its sides. Being weightless and watching the cars travel to and fro, I felt like I was frozen, pinned to the sky with an invisible thumbtack, stuck in a moment in time while the rest of the world continued spinning. And then there were the mountains. God, I love those mountains. I will sorely miss them when I go home.
I was holding on to the go pro camera-on-a-stick the entire time, but I was so deeply entranced by the view that I forgot all about it. Eventually, Mr. Lee grabbed it from me and started moving it around to show me what I was supposed to do before handing it back. You can see this in the video below. The problem is, after that, I became concerned with not dropping the damn thing--even though I knew full well that it was clipped to my side. With my luck, something would go wrong and Mr. Lee would be out of a camera.
Our flight lasted a good ten minutes. Towards the end, as we turned to line up with the dirt road-turned-runway, we flew right over the highway, and I couldn't help but wonder what the people in those cars were thinking.
As came in for our landing, Mr. Lee tried telling me that I was to lift my legs when we hit the ground. I didn't understand why, but I did as I was told, and I successfully landed on my ass and very much alive.
Huzzah!
I thanked Mr. Lee profusely, not just for the successful flight, but for giving me the opportunity of a lifetime.
Megan, Kelleen, and our Korean friend were waiting for us at the bottom with the van. I didn't give the girls any of the details, preferring to make it a surprise.
Mr. Lee and his compatriot were hungry, so we grabbed lunch at a Korean restaurant nearby before making our way back up the mountain.
Kelleen was next. While she waited for her turn, we saw the unthinkable happen. A man took off, and everything seemed to go fine for about five seconds, and then his canopy went flat and he disappeared out of sight. I have no idea how far he fell, but some girls went looking for him over the edge, and we didn't see any of them for the rest of the day. I like to think that they helped the guy up and they walked back up to the top of the mountain along some dirt road. That's totally what happened. I think.
To our surprise, the next person in line took off without missing a beat. Nobody seemed particularly concerned for this fellow. The show must go on, after all.
Kudos to Kelleen--this didn't seem to shake her at all despite the fact that she was one person away from taking to the skies.
After Kelleen successfully took flight, Megan and I caught another frightful sight. This time, the person was much higher in the sky when their canopy got tangled on one end and they started free-falling for a good couple seconds before it somehow became untangled and he leveled out. You could hear everybody hold their collective breaths in that moment. Of course this only increased poor Megan's fears.
I'm happy to say that I successfully maneuvered that beastly van down the mountain's zigzagging roller coaster roads and we picked up our two little gachis.
By the time we got back to the top, it was round 2:00 in the afternoon, and there were at least 14 paragliders drifting in the air like mystical birds. It was quite the sight to behold.
Megan had some sweaty palm action going on from nervousness, but to her credit, she didn't back down, and of the three of us, she looks the most ecstatic and gleeful in her airborne pictures.
Having survived our adventure, we agreed a celebratory pizza was in order, and so once Mr. Lee dropped us off back in new downtown, we made our way to my favourite restaurant in all of Ulsan: Bella de Notte. I can't think of a better meal to celebrate being alive than my very own Italian Margarita pizza, topped off with a nice cold Moretti beer.
And if that weren't enough, the day was capped off with a visit to a DVD room and a screening of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained. It was quite possibly the best day I've had in Ulsan to date.
This past weekend, however, I finally got to experience the thrill of flight through different means: paragliding. Now before I came to Korea, I didn't know anything about the world of paragliding. I'd never seen anybody paraglide and I'd never heard of people talk about it, so it was a completely foreign concept to me. I mean, as a kid, I always remember seeing shows and movies where characters jumped out of a plane--who can forget the classic Full House episode where Uncle Jesse gets stuck in a tree and almost misses his own wedding?--but you never saw anybody go paragliding.
Hoping to check skydiving off my bucket list while in Korea, I kept coming up empty. However, in the process, I did stumble upon the exciting world of paragliding, and I knew I had to do it, winter weather be damned.
And so it was, that Saturday morning, I woke up and thought to myself, "Today is a good day to jump off a mountain"--and it was! The weather was nice and cool and there wasn't a single cloud in the sky.
I got to Lotte Hotel at 9:30 to meet my jumping compatriots, Megan and Kelleen, and our tandem superstar, Mr. Lee. We got in his van and drove off to pick up another fellow, who we initially thought was Mr. Lee's business partner, but turned out to just be a friend and fellow paragliding enthusiast.
During the hour and a half drive to and from the jumping site, we got to know a bit about Mr. Lee while he pointed out points of interest, such as a cable car running up a mountain or a field of honey apple trees. Mr. Lee sported a full head of grey hair under a grey St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap. At 64 years of age, you can tell that 20 years of paragliding have helped keep him young at heart; he had a child-like and contagious grin that he flashed at every opportunity.
 |
| A friendlier chap you won't find around here. |
We eventually arrived at the landing spot, which was just a small dirt road that went under an overpass. He and the other fellow in the back got out, left us alone in the van, and they started talking to a group of men that were already there waiting when we arrived. The girls and I found it slightly sketchy. Was this all a set up? Were they waiting here to get the drop on us? I mean if I wanted to rob some foreigners and make them disappear, this looked like as good of a place as any. Childhood stories tell us that nothing good ever comes from being under a bridge or overpass.
Thankfully, we were just being paranoid, and the whole gang hopped in the van.
 |
| The landing spot and the overpass that was possibly going to serve as our grave. Our flight would start from the top of that very mountain! |
It turned out that my job was to pick up Mr. Lee and Megan or Kelleen after they jumped so he could drive us back to the top and we could do it all over again. The other guy in the van had nothing to do with our little adventure.
The road up the mountain was steep and winding, with some sharp F1-type turns. The thought of having to drive a bulky van down this treacherous road made me nervous. I just prayed Mr. Lee regularly checked the brakes.
When we got to the top of the mountain and we looked out at the view, that's when shit got real. We unloaded the equipment and made our way to the jump spot. To my surprise, there was a large group of people waiting for their turn to jump. It reminded me of airplanes waiting for their turn to take off from the runway. Watching the first guy take off was so surreal; it was like something out of Super Mario World.
For those who have never seen paragliding before, two or three people stand ten feet or so behind you, holding your canopy. The jumper starts out facing the canopy while holding onto the suspension lines that connect to the canopy, as if holding on to an assortment of balloons, and starts running backwards. Once the canopy inflates, the jumper lets go of the lines, turns around, and starts running for dear life until the end of the runway. Then it's essentially sink or swim.
 |
| It's sink or swim time, Megan! |
The takeoff was definitely the scariest part for exactly that reason. First of all, when you're running, you can't look back, so you don't know if your canopy is inflating properly. If you hear people screaming behind you, that's pretty much your only signal to stop running. It happened a couple times right before I was supposed to go, and it made me somewhat weary. You're at the wind's mercy at that point.
Mr. Lee called the group over and held out what looked like an extendable police baton with really good reach, except there was a small go pro camera attached at the end. I figured he wanted to take a group photo in case this was the last time we'd all be seen together and alive.
 |
| From left to right: Uriel Mendoza, Kelleen Lanagan, and Megan Huber. Last seen together in the Cheongdo area heading towards a mountain in a minivan with a man in his 60's. |
I stood in front of Mr. Lee and got clipped on to him, my life resting in his hands, and was instructed to run when given the signal. The canopy pulls you in the opposite direction, but you have to keep pumping those legs until you run out of runway.
I honestly don't remember what was going through my mind as I stood waiting for the signal. My emotions fell somewhere between excited and nervous, but fear had definitely left the picture as soon as I was strapped on to Mr. Lee. Somehow, I just knew everything would work out fine.
You know how as a kid, you're always told to look away from the needle when you're getting an injection? I think not being able to see the canopy and whether or not it was inflating properly behind me just put it out of my thoughts. The only thing running through my mind was the word "run" in big bold letters, and that's exactly what I did until I couldn't feel the ground beneath me anymore. With my feet dangling beneath me, Mr. Lee instructed me to sit back. The turtle shell backpack that I was wearing was essentially a car seat. I sat back while Mr. Lee danced and flirted with the winds and I enjoyed the view.
In that initial moment of flight, I was surprised to find that rather than experiencing an adrenaline rush, I was overcome by an unparalleled level of tranquility and serenity that made me laugh uncontrollably. Life was perfect. Directly below me was the very road we had taken to get to the mountain's peak. I admired its beautiful curves and the trees that stood guard along its sides. Being weightless and watching the cars travel to and fro, I felt like I was frozen, pinned to the sky with an invisible thumbtack, stuck in a moment in time while the rest of the world continued spinning. And then there were the mountains. God, I love those mountains. I will sorely miss them when I go home.
I was holding on to the go pro camera-on-a-stick the entire time, but I was so deeply entranced by the view that I forgot all about it. Eventually, Mr. Lee grabbed it from me and started moving it around to show me what I was supposed to do before handing it back. You can see this in the video below. The problem is, after that, I became concerned with not dropping the damn thing--even though I knew full well that it was clipped to my side. With my luck, something would go wrong and Mr. Lee would be out of a camera.
Our flight lasted a good ten minutes. Towards the end, as we turned to line up with the dirt road-turned-runway, we flew right over the highway, and I couldn't help but wonder what the people in those cars were thinking.
As came in for our landing, Mr. Lee tried telling me that I was to lift my legs when we hit the ground. I didn't understand why, but I did as I was told, and I successfully landed on my ass and very much alive.
Huzzah!
I thanked Mr. Lee profusely, not just for the successful flight, but for giving me the opportunity of a lifetime.
Megan, Kelleen, and our Korean friend were waiting for us at the bottom with the van. I didn't give the girls any of the details, preferring to make it a surprise.
Mr. Lee and his compatriot were hungry, so we grabbed lunch at a Korean restaurant nearby before making our way back up the mountain.
Kelleen was next. While she waited for her turn, we saw the unthinkable happen. A man took off, and everything seemed to go fine for about five seconds, and then his canopy went flat and he disappeared out of sight. I have no idea how far he fell, but some girls went looking for him over the edge, and we didn't see any of them for the rest of the day. I like to think that they helped the guy up and they walked back up to the top of the mountain along some dirt road. That's totally what happened. I think.
To our surprise, the next person in line took off without missing a beat. Nobody seemed particularly concerned for this fellow. The show must go on, after all.
Kudos to Kelleen--this didn't seem to shake her at all despite the fact that she was one person away from taking to the skies.
After Kelleen successfully took flight, Megan and I caught another frightful sight. This time, the person was much higher in the sky when their canopy got tangled on one end and they started free-falling for a good couple seconds before it somehow became untangled and he leveled out. You could hear everybody hold their collective breaths in that moment. Of course this only increased poor Megan's fears.
I'm happy to say that I successfully maneuvered that beastly van down the mountain's zigzagging roller coaster roads and we picked up our two little gachis.
By the time we got back to the top, it was round 2:00 in the afternoon, and there were at least 14 paragliders drifting in the air like mystical birds. It was quite the sight to behold.
Megan had some sweaty palm action going on from nervousness, but to her credit, she didn't back down, and of the three of us, she looks the most ecstatic and gleeful in her airborne pictures.
 |
| This is the look of fear. |
Having survived our adventure, we agreed a celebratory pizza was in order, and so once Mr. Lee dropped us off back in new downtown, we made our way to my favourite restaurant in all of Ulsan: Bella de Notte. I can't think of a better meal to celebrate being alive than my very own Italian Margarita pizza, topped off with a nice cold Moretti beer.
 |
| This was taken on my very first visit to Bella de Notte. This picture is my happy place. |
 |
| Waygooks: 1; Mountain: 0. |
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