Himalayas with tandem

The beauty of adventuring is that it is a very individual thing. Adventures often begin where the comfort zone finishes. For top sportsmen, like Paragliding World Cup Champion Aaron Durogati or K2 conqueress Tamara Lunger, to leave their comfort zones and live an adventure, they usually have to take on extreme projects. Adventure and positive sustainable experiences often occur when you haven’t planned much, and are open to something new.

Aaron did just that. For autumn 2017 the ADVANCE X-Alps team pilot had originally planned something outside his considerable flying comfort zone in Nepal. A knee injury, a side effect of the X-Alps, compelled him to change the programme. Tamara also had to cut short her expedition to Kangchenjunga in Spring 2017 on health grounds.

So why not go to India together, make a relaxed climb up a Himalyan peak or two and fly down with the tandem? The idea was quickly put into practice. The team was joined by photographer and filmmaker Alessandro d' Emilia, and in October the three friends set off for the departure point Bir in Himachal Pradesh, northern India.

With Himalayan foothills and wide plains to the south India’s most popular flying area reminds one of Bassano in Italy: only everything is a whole order bigger. At the back the peaks go up 6,000 metres into the sky. And that’s exactly where Aaron and Tamara wanted to go: with car, two tents (one as a valley base, one as high camp, if required) and PI BI light tandem. They planned to stay a month, three weeks of it without internet and weather information.

Each day the big-mountain lady and the paragliding professional climbed a different mountain of up to 5,700 m. From the valley they would look for a possible line and follow it. They would circle up to more than 6,200 m and then would often fly two or three hours cross country, covering as much as 90 kilometers. “Once I decided, on top of a mountain, that we would not take off”, describes Aaron. :I cannot remember the last time this happened to me.”

On this day Aaron said that he had a gut feeling that the situation was dangerous; “even though it looked stable and harmless!” His feelings turned out to be correct. At 1pm a sudden storm broke. You couldn’t see anything, because we were totally in cloud, remembers Aaron.

After years of training, and the paraglider professional’s experience in flying extreme wings in extreme conditions - so deeply anchored in Aaron’s subconscious - the 31 year old doesn’t have to think much about how he does it, as a rule.

In India it was often different. Flying in an unknown, very demanding meteorological and geographical region without weather forecast, and to decide every day afresh where the limits of the possible lay, took Aaron partly back to his time as beginner. Here were places where he had to observe, scrutinise, assess all the evidence before takeoff as well as in the air, and attempt to find the right answer. Things which later would be obvious to an experienced pilot, with good weather forecasting.

“It’s great that that you can communicate everything in the air on a tandem flight”, explained Aaron. “This was totally new for me. Normally the first chance to talk about a flight is on the landing field, and even with commercial tandems it’s not the same thing.” Cross countries with the tandem were something new.

As well as the interaction he especially liked the shared experiences. Once they flew in company with twelve eagles. “Tamara was entranced! We circled together in the same thermal up to cloudbase, just like a competition gaggle”, he described. Only one of them insisted on circling the wrong way. In one core the eagle missed our canopy by about half a metre. “These tandem experiences, and those that made me feel like a beginner again, are those that will stay with me from India.”