Paragliding in Manali

What a fantastic vacation it was. I have always had a knack for adventure sports and Paragliding was loads of fun as well as satisfaction to learn something new. Five of us went together to do a course on Paragliding at Solang close to Manali.  

Continuing the tradition of live blogging in Ladakh, I wrote most of the blog during the vacation itself, and this time it was much easier to type on my iPhone. 

10-10 8:30 PM

Learning from the mistakes of Ladakh Trip, we booked a HPRTC Volvo Coach well in advance. In the bus right now and it looks pretty good. This is the last official bus to manali. However, lots of private deluxe and sleeper buses seem to be available.

11-10 11:30 AM

Reached manali in exactly 15 hours. Gonna be leaving for Solang Valley(thats where the paragliding happens) immediately via a taxi. He has agreed for 400 bucks.

11-10 10:00 PM

Today has been all about resting. While having lunch at our hotel, we spotted some people doing paragliding and clicked photos. 

First View

Had a walk in the evening to the paragliding centre. There is Horse Riding, Zorbing and a ride in an all terrain vehicle. Prices are exorbitant and nothing other than Paragliding seemed interesting. 

Zorbing

12-10 3:00PM

Today is our first day at paragliding. Our instructor is Mr. Anil. The first session was pretty good. Paragliding is best during summers. Heated surface generates thermals needed for high flying. Also the wind needs to be continuously belly up.

The basic concept of paragliding is "take the glider and run". As Rishi Kapoor said in Namastey London - ball phad, aur saand ki tarah bhaag.

Run hard

4:30PM

We couldn't do any paragliding in the afternoon as the tail wind started instead of belly up. Need to start early tomorrow.
6:30PM 

We met Mr. Bhagat, who is the organizer here. Very nice guy. He would be giving us lift to Manali. On the way, he showed us this great place for pizza and beer. Its called Himalayan sports club and its open only on Sundays. After a good pizza, we are off to manali. 

With Bhagatji

13-10 8:00PM

A very satisfying day at Paragliding. The trainers today were sikander and dharmender, two young and enthusiast chaps. During the last practice of the day, I was actually able to take off. Shobhit also reached pretty close to taking off. One bad thing that happened was that Shitiz got injured during the start of the day. Though the injury is minor, it prevented him from any practice today. We came back at 4, rested and then left for Vashisht Springs and manali at 6.
10:00 PM

We had a bath in the hot spring of Vashisht Temple. The water was pretty hot. It was just great. Had dinner and came back.

Come on Fight

14-10 4:00 PM - Rest Day.

We decided to take a day off from paragliding as everyone was pretty tired. Shitiz injury is not yet healed. It came out to be a good decision as it started raining around 11AM, which meant we could anyways not paraglide today. We decided to visit Manikaran to visit the gurudwara and the hot water springs there. Manikaran is quite a long drive from solang. The route is solang -> manali -> kullu -> manikaran. Took us 2.5 hrs to reach there. We visited the gurudwara and had langar. Then we saw the hot water springs and the shiva temple of Manikaran. The water was boiling hot. Even the temple surface was pretty hot due to the water.

Hot Springs

8:00PM

We went to Kullu to see the dussehra mela. Kullu Dussehra is famous and is celebrated over 7 days here. Various god statues from nearby villages are brought over to kullu where the kullu god is brought by the king of kullu. We reached just in time to see the procession of the gods.

Kullu Dev

Now we are going to manali to have dinner.

15-10 11:30 PM

Another rest day, a forced one. We started at 10 in the morning in overcast conditions. Barely did 3 flights when it started raining. Kept on raining throughtout the day. We have been playing dumb charades of Hindi songs since yesterday and we continued that. We have pretty much guessed every song of the world :D Sleeping and playing dumb charades has been the order of the day.

16-10 1:00PM

It hasn't stopped raining yet. Shobhit is not too happy. He wants to fly. But it seems like our paragliding dreams are over. It has snowed a lot at Rohtang and the roads are blocked. There is snowfall in Marhi too, which is normally the location for medium flying (i.e. people paraglide from Marhi to Solang). High Flying is from Rohtang to Solang, take around 45 mins. 

We went to Manali in the morning to take Shitiz to a local doctor to fix the bone joint of his knee.
We would be going to Marhi today to enjoy the snow.

11:00PM

Marhi was fantastic. I remember stopping at this place when we went to Ladakh. This time around it was covered with snow. Snowfall was going on when we reached, and we played in the snow for a while. Took some nice photos as well. The weather got cleared by the time we came back which gave us hopes of paragliding for tomorrow.

The Five Samurai

White all around

Marhi Panorama

At 11 in the night, I came out to photograph the snow covered mountains under the moonlight. Whatever photography knowledge I have gained so far got me this photo which I would call my best photo so far. 

Mountain in Moonlight

17-10 7:00PM

Beautiful sunny day. Paragliding at last. Started at 10 today. Shitiz is still not fit and Kirti got unwell due to the snow last night. So its gonna be just me, shobhit and shubra. We had quite a few flights today. Notice that I used the word flights and not trial :-) we learned a lot today and got lifted quite a bit in our flights. We paraglided till around 2 after which the tail wind started.

11:00 PM

We got tickets for Volvo coach back to Delhi for tomorrow at 5:30PM. Tomorrow is going to be our last day here and at Paragliding. We plan to paraglide till around 12PM and also get a tandem flight from medium height if possible. 

18-10 6:00PM

Another very satisfying day at Paragliding. This also concludes a very satisfying paragliding beginner's course. Shobhit and me both got some great flights, and I was able to reach the highest point for a beginner to take off from, in the last flight of the day.

Me Flying


Shobhit Flying

I finished the flight, took off the harness and helmet and went over to Sikander. As soon as he sees me, he says Aap Pitching theek se control nahi kar rahe hai, this is dangerous ... not really realizing that I am done for the season. That has been the story of the two coaches, Sikander and Dharmender, very keen on teaching and very strict. Next time when I come over, I would like to continue the classes and scoldings from them. 

With Dharmender and Sikander

Shubra and Shitiz did tandem flights too.

Shubhra Flying


Shitiz Flying

Now we are in the bus back to Delhi, ending a fantastic week. Next destination for me would be my hometown Jaipur, where I'll stay till Diwali. See ya and have a great Diwali. 

Off to Manali

Its been 3 good months in Bangalore. Its been fascinating working on Must See India and there has been great progress to keep the enthu going. For one, the traffic on Must See India has doubled in these 3 months! But the real motivation is the encouraging comments for travel enthusiasts that keep on flowing.

Other happenings in these 3 months have been Tennis, trip to Coonoor, two trips to Chennai and a rediscovered interest in photography. Traveling with some great photographers to Coonoor gave me motivation to get better pictures from my camera and I have been working towards learning the manual modes of my Canon Powershot S3 IS. The best of the pictures that I have taken all go in this Must See Photo Album.

After a real busy past 2 weeks, its time to take a break and do what I like the most - travel! Leaving for Delhi today, and then to Manali. The primary agenda is gonna be Paragliding at Solang Valley. And its gonna be a 5 day course where we should (hopefully) be able to paraglide all by ourselves.

So here I go, wishing everyone Happy Dusshera and a prosperous Diwali in this festive month.

Ideas are dime a dozen

Most people in startups or planning to startup have now dispelled the notion that one needs to come up with a great unique idea to succeed. What I believe is more important is whether you are solving a real pain point of a real customer and can you execute your idea to perfection.

For those who are still living in the idea world, here are 30 ideas that ycombinator would like to fund.

6 years of software engineering

This is probably going to be the shortest review so far. I have already talked about my new venture a while back. Life has not been the same ever since. I always thought of life as a series of challenges. You solve one, you get another. The level keeps on increasing. Its almost like playing a game. I am pretty satisfied with the way I completed the previous level, and what gives me extra satisfaction is the 2 statements my previous company's GM made when I was about to leave:

• You have very high professional ethics, and such people succeed in the long run.
• You have followed one of the most complete career paths in this company.

That level is over, and its time to play up the highest professional challenge.

On the personal side, life continues to be a roller coaster. I remember that long long time ago (before I even started this blog), I took an EQ (Emotional Quotient) test. In the results, they said that I fell into the same category as Albert Einstein did. Before I could feel proud, I read the next line which said - Albert Einstein had 3 broken marriages.

Back to Bangalore

There is one thing I really like when I go on a drive. Switch off the AC, pull down the windows and feel the cool breeze on my face. Can I get that in Delhi? Only in my dreams. Can I get that in Bangalore? Probably 4 years earlier, but not today.
The weather is still magnificent, but all that one gets today is polluted air and noise. The amount of pollution and noise on the city roads has gone up significantly.

I shifted to Bangalore a week back. It has been 4 years since I left this place. Since then, I see more things worsening rather than improving. Good that my home is my office, and I don't have to drive everyday.

On the brighter side, there are quite a few places around Bangalore to make a 1 day/weekend trip and I really should be planning one soon.

A New Beginning

6 years in software industry. 3 years in a software product company working on a web-based product.
That is the time it took me to realize what I really want.

Last year, I talked about how I have always been fascinated by software products which can solve pains. I also talked about the potential of Indian software market, and that we software professionals in India need to serve our own people.
There is one more thing to talk about. That I am a travel buff. And after traveling to quite a few places over the past few years, I find out that the pains to traveling remain the same. Its always about:

• When to go
• Where to go
• who else is available to go with me
• where would I stay
• what would be the prices like
• what to do while I am there
• My friends are too lazy to send me the pictures.

To solve all traveler's pains, here comes ... let the drums roll ... www.MustSeeIndia.com. It's gonna solve all my pains. It's gonna plan my holiday. It's gonna make my lazy friends upload their photos. It's gonna fetch me the best deals.
Well .... not quite all pains as yet. We are a young startup who aim at connecting travel enthusiasts. We know that its people who solve each other's pain by sharing their experiences.

Communication with our readers is really important for us and hence the first thing I did was to setup a MustSeeIndia Blog. See you there.

Three weeks in US

I am going back to India after 3 weeks of stay here. It has been a lot different than what it was last year when I first visited US..

I have too many mixed feelings this time around. I don't know whether coming here was a good idea or bad. Going back today, I don't know whether am happy or sad. And overall I still am not sure whether I would call it a good trip.

I have this firm belief that whatever happens, happens for good, and am gonna stick to that.

So bye bye US, you are pretty cool, but India is where I belong, India is what I love, and am looking forward to meet all my friends and start a new phase of life.