bright – Kieran Campbell

12 July 2010

Mount Buffalo

For over a month I’d been soaring over Mystic, using the looming lump of Mount Buffalo to the west to gauge how high I was, but I’d yet to make the mere 25km trip to the mountain. Leanne and Greg thought we could go up there and camp out for a night around their day off – being the owners of the hostel and the jewellery shop, and living in Bright, means they can get away with closing the shop and letting the hostel run its self every Tuesday. As the Tuesday came around, they couldn’t make it, but in their usual super-kind fashion they chucked enough gear in their 4×4 for Crystal and I to start a Polar expedition, and let us drive up to Buffalo ourselves. Seriously, I can’t go on enough about just how lucky I was to stay at their hostel and have them help me in so many ways.

Ovens Valley Dawn

Tuesday came, and Crystal – a Canadian who’d came to pick grapes at Boynton’s winery – and I headed out past Porepunkah, up the Mt Buffalo Road. As with most of Australia’s national parks there are fees for entering and I think it was about $18 for us to take the car in, which made it really surprising that to reserve a camping spot beside Lake Catani only pushed that up to about $25. The drive up is steep and winding: great since I was driving, but the trees blocked out most of the views of the lowlands that fell away around us as we headed to the plateau.

I’d only had my laptop for a week or so and was itching to try some time-lapse photography, now that I had a way of automatically triggering the camera. Lake Catani, surrounded by reeds, and with a few ducks and a canoe floating around in the ever-changing light, was too good an opportunity to miss so I perched the laptop on a rock at the lake’s edge and left the kit doing its thing for about half an hour, while I blitzed through the crisps I’d bought in the name of ’emergency supplies’. The campsite was set a few hundred metres from the lake, and when we found our site we realised the park ranger had given us one of the best spots, sheltered under trees at the edge of the site, with an unrestricted view of the lake. The tent Greg had packed turned out to be a small mansion, possibly visible from space, well, at least the other side of the lake.

Buffalo

Next we headed to The Horn – I didn’t know anything about where the best sights on the massif were so was trusting Crystal’s experience – first reaching the lookout, perched on the edge of a cliff with mist washing up the face. Thoughts of the Himalayas came to me as parts of the rocky landscape revealed themselves but for moments through the waves of mist. Up at the peak, the view was impressive, albeit over a landscape that felt anonymous to me as a new-comer to the area. The cloud-base not far above my head was breaking up the light across the plateau in a fairly interesting way so I tried another time-lapse, looking back across the Giant’s Playground to our next stop: The Cathedral.

We decided to climb the hill across the road from the Cathedral, as Crystal hadn’t been up it, but got distracted by a huge and precariously-perched rock and the prehistoric-looking landscape behind it, and ended up chilling in the calm sunny afternoon there for a while. We followed a track downhill a little bit and ended at a base of a hill made up entirely of massive boulders, so big I had to leave my camera at the bottom before trying out my pretty non-existent bouldering skills, but I managed to get up far enough to get a nice view over where we’d came from.

Buffalo Sunrise

We ended up at the Chalet to watch the sunset from the top of monumental drop into the gorge. We were really on the wrong side of Buffalo as the sun was setting over by the Horn lookout, but at least at this side the landscape of the Ovens Valley was much more recognisable, stretching from the Eurobin – where I’d worked on a berry farm – back to Bright and the Mystic Launch. Back at the lake I thought I’d be warm enough with my roll-mat and a few blankets, but about an hour in I had to go back on that plan and get the sleeping bag out before I went hypothermic.

Deciding the view from the Chalet at sunrise would definitely be worth getting up for, we did exactly that and I set up a time-lapse at the hang-gliding launch ramp. The launch ramp is just a 5-meter timber ramp rolling off to the sheer +500m drop to the bottom of the gorge in a ridiculously scary fashion. I tried to stand on it but dared only put one foot on the sloped part of it. While the laptop and old camera were doing their thing, the sun broke through the clouds casting some amazingly strong and focussed rays across the valley, keeping me fixated with the other camera for the next hour. It was good to be sitting in one spot, focussing on one scene, instead of running around from place to place trying to capture as many sights as possible while not really giving any one them the attention it deserved to create a truly decent shot.

A Typical Weekend

I was pretty sure I was rostered on at the brewery for 1pm that day, giving us time to pack up and check out one or two sights on the way back to Bright. I’ve found some brilliant spots, both in Australia and back home, just by taking the more obscure roads, and that thinking led us down a dirt track with the perfect mix of corners and crests to make haring along it really fun. Luckily Crystal seemed to trust my driving along the road that branched off near the snow-clearing station and led to a few walking tracks that led back in the direction of the Cathedral. We didn’t make it as far as we wanted as I was worried about not making it back to Bright in time and it’d definitely be worth a revisit. The worrying was well-justified: getting back to Bright at 11.30 I phoned in to check when I was starting, ’15 minutes’, oops..

17 June 2010

Getting Stuck into Bright

Littoria

With the 9-day licence course completed, I was at a bit of a loose end. Having spent almost every day last week flying, I’d now to make do with the more typical forecast of intermittent days of flying, giving me, initially, time to rest and reflect on what I’d accomplished in the last week, as well as time to think about how long I wanted to stay in Bright. Now half-way through my year in Australia, but having clocked up less than a third of the days of work I needed to do to be eligible for a second year visa, I had to start thinking about doing farm work again, so I took a cycle up the Wandiligong Valley one morning in search of the Nightingale Brothers’ farm.

Bright in Bright

Nightingales’ is the biggest farm in the area, with an expanse of apples (I think it’s the biggest orchard in – as is the usual kicker with Australian records – the southern hemisphere) and chestnuts, luring in hundreds of backpackers – in particular, curiously, Koreans – months ahead of season. It seems that, with such high demand for their employment, the Nightingale brothers could do this really annoying thing where every time I turned up at the farm asking for work, they would tell me to come back in two weeks. Leanne and Greg, owners of Bright Hikers, are some of the kindest people I’ve met, so nice that they let me borrow their 4×4 for a day to have a better stab at job hunting so, after enjoying a week spent mostly in the hammock on the verandah, and occasionally flying, I drove to Nightingales for one last time then tried some farms on the Great Alpine Road towards Eurobin. After the usual dismissive, devoid of all interest, response from the apple farm, I was happy to be finally at least being asked for my name and number by Boynton’s Winery and the Bright Berry Farm, amongst others. None of them seemed optimistic about the opportunity of work, but at least they were more sincere about it, and they had my number. In fact by the time I’d got back to Bright I had a message from the berry farm saying they had a position for me, starting next morning.

Nicky Bomba

Back at the hostel, Leanne told me she’d heard the Bright Brewery might be looking for bar staff so I had a look down. Having never worked in a bar, I didn’t fancy my chances for the job – it couldn’t be that hard, surely – but it looked like an OK place and I’d met two of the guys who worked there last week so knew I’d be working with cool folks. It turned out they were interested enough, so I was back an hour later after hunting down a pad of paper from the supermarket and scrawling down what vaguely resembled a C.V. in my typically poor attempt at neat handwriting. C.V. handed in, I was asked to hang around for a couple of hours as they were training Danny who hadn’t yet done a shift, so it made sense to get me done at the same time, and at that point, I guess I’d secured my second job in a day.

Sunday Arvo

What followed were a few seriously busy weeks, where I’d do at least two of the three: vine maintenance, working at the brewery, and flying, each day, typically up at 6, cycling 13km to the berry farm for start at sunrise, getting home about 3, then either floating around in the smooth late afternoon air á la paraglider, or putting in a few hours at the brewery. It was a good time, even though it made every second of sleep count, being up to see the sun rise and set, cycling 15 miles a day, doing at least one job I really liked (brewery) and one that was OK, still getting time to fly, and all in Bright. I didn’t care that I was slowly wasting away the time I had left to explore the rest of Australia, I was earning money, getting to know people – better than you get to the know them when you’re touring round the coast – and generally settling into life in the alpine region.

Bright

As the weeks went by, things only got busier, with me adding two unofficial jobs to my workload so I was – aside from a bartender and vine maintainer – supplying photography to the paragliding school, and tending to the IT needs of the hostel, which doubled up as an internet café. Life couldn’t get much better, I was using just about all my skills to tie down paying jobs, as well as work that paid the kind of perks that made living, and playing, in Bright very affordable for me, and soon jokes were being made – cautiously – about when I would really leave the sleepy little town…

2 June 2010

Cross-Country Flying

Bliss

A month on from when I was first able to gleefully say I was a ‘pilot’, I’d clocked up over 40 flights and 17 hours air-time, and I definitely felt a lot more experienced for it. I needn’t worry about being overly-cocky as the past week had seen my confidence in the air take a big hit after having a fairly scary collapse not far above launch. I knew tensing up every time I hit the slightest ripple in the air wasn’t going to help my skills progress and hoped that, with a few more flights in lightly active air, I’d be able to show myself that I could control the wing in conditions that had previously got the better of me.

Soon enough, things started feeling a bit more natural, and I finally felt comfortable enough to try something that had been nagging me for weeks: a reverse-launch off Mystic. It surprised me just how easy it was, leaving me wishing – as I was whisked into the air before completing my first step forward – that I’d tried it sooner. Now well into April, having missed some of the best flying of the year because I was working every hour I could at the Brewery, I was definitely ready for some soaring again and couldn’t wait for the start of the cross-country course Ted invited me on. Frustratingly, the first few days weren’t quite good enough to make a stab at a cross-country flight, but that probably worked out for the better, as they were unstable enough to help me re-build my confidence in active air, and I still got a few flights that tipped over the hour mark. I had fun trying to do some semi-formation-flying with Bill – an instructor who’s taken some great photos from the air – giving me more practice with my camera in the air as well as finally getting some decent shots of me flying.

Master of the sky

Each morning Bill would talk Ben, Charles and I through a plan for the most likely cross-country option for the day ahead, whizzing round Google Earth pointing out routes, thermal trigger points, landing sites, no-landing sites, as well as showing us how to interpret various weather forecasts. Today our likely target was Harrietville – a town 15km along the Great Alpine Road from Bright – and, as we caught a strong climb above Mystic, it was looking like it was going to be the day we’d finally break away from the comfort of our training ground. First, led by Bill, we checked out an alternative route, heading north along the ridge from Mystic, but doubled back in the unrelenting sink and topped up our height over Mystic again. This time Bill headed east across the Wandiligong Valley to the Reliance Ridge, with Ben and I soon following at almost identical altitudes, side-by-side but for a hundred metres or so to maximise our chances of finding lift. Charles followed shortly after, having eeked out a few extra metres height from the thermal we’d all been in.

One of the great experiences in paragliding is the hands-off gliding time: now out of the reliable lift that Mystic offered, all I could do was sit back, tuck my hands in my jacket to warm them up again, and think about just how awesome it was to be floating effortlessly above the stunning valley below. Over Reliance Ridge we got our first climb quite quickly, recovering most of the height we’d lost crossing the valley, continuing south along it. I didn’t envy Charles, who just missed out on the lift that we’d used and had to scratch along the ridge below us, a position that wasn’t nearly as comfortable as where we were. In what must have been a pretty good effort, he kept ‘up’ with us as we soared along the ridge, now reaching the tree-carpeted-bowl that stood, dauntingly, between us and our target. Somehow, all of us struggled to maintain height, never-mind find the lift that we desperately needed to make a crossing of the bowl possible. This was bad enough for Ben, Bill and I, who were high, but for Charles it was the end of the flight and he had to bail out on the road near Smoko.

Hard Work

With so many places where there could be lift, it was frustrating to be almost aimlessly floating around, but finally, after flying over a spot I’d covered a minute earlier, my wing banked and I hooked round into a strong thermal. Bill and Ben headed for the lift, but Ben couldn’t make it with his height and had to follow Charles to the road, while Bill soared past me and we both headed across the bowl. This was a bit daunting, nothing but trees all around me, a ridge that presented its self like a wall in my path, and Bill calling over the radio, slightly concerned at my apparent height. We’d talked about the bowl in the morning, discussing what would be a safe minimum height to start crossing at, and I’d started at almost exactly that, so all I could do was sit back, use some speed-bar to cut through the steady sink and keep an eye on the limited bail-out options I had.

Approaching the ridge only a few hundred metres above it, Bill, who’d lost some height to join me and make sure I was flying safely, guided me round the edge of the ridge, avoiding the highest part, giving the most impressive opening view of a village I’d never even been to before. Gliding round the ridge, so low that we were almost in shade from the late-afternoon sun, the ridge fell away and opened up a stunning view of Harrietville, basking in the last of the day’s light. Now safely on glide to the landing site, I grabbed my camera, not wanting to miss the chance to capture the beauty of discovering a new place from the air.

Hello, Harrietville

The tension of the last 10 minutes gave way to relief, and the realisation that I’d made it: my first cross-country flight. There was a moment, as I followed Bill down to land, where I was a wee bit nervous again as the field had a small burn on one side, cows on the other, and power lines running along another edge, but following Bill’s lead and doing some S-turns to lose some height, I made it. Two hours ago, I’d jumped off and floated away from the comfort of my training hill: now I was over 10 miles away in a village I’d never seen before, watching the setting sun cast its last golden rays over the mountains that surrounded me. If ever there was a way to explore the world, this was it.

6 May 2010

Back to Backpacking

Porepunkah Fall

May: winter is definitely on it’s way, the soaring days are few and far between, I’ve quit my brewery job, and the hostel is closing up so Greg and Leanne can have a holiday in a few weeks. It’s time to ease myself back into backpacking, but it’s been so long, I’ve had the same bed in the same room, with the same cosy lounge, kitchen and verandah for so long that Bright really feels like home. It’s Saturday, 1st May and I’ve already pushed back my departure date from Wednesday to Friday, then upon hearing today would be a good flying day and that Kieran Schultz was coming down, finally Saturday.

We head up to Mystic, I’ve had 2 runs up this hill committed to thinking they would be my last, but I can’t quite get away. The wind is strong, almost too strong, but that’s fine: it’ll be a slightly more demanding flight than what I’m used to, and I’ll get to practise my reverse-launch technique again. In the air, the ridge-lift is good and I manage to float down towards the paddock then crawl right back over launch a couple of times until, just before an hour’s airtime, I can’t maintain height any longer and finish off what might, again, be my last flight in Bright, taking a moment to sit back and soak in the beauty of the Wandiligong valley from the air one last time. We end up hanging around with Ted and Bret as they take this month’s would-be pilot out to Reeds for their first bit of ground-handling, and it seems like a good idea to get as much practice at my forward launches as possible as they’ve been a bit shakey. Once the wind has died down we get one last sled run from Mystic – this one spent not trying to fly, just sitting back, hands stretched out, taking in every last second of the smooth glide down to the paddock, and then it was done: I was really finished flying in Bright.

Base view

Bright is the first place in Australia that’s made me sad to leave as I’ve made a few friends here who I honestly hope I’ll see again, not that I’m forgetting some people from before Bright who I plan to meet up with back in Europe too. So after running round town saying farewell to a few folks, I was really, really, leaving Bright, heading to Kieran’s parents’ place for tea and a night’s sleep. Originally, I was going to try to be in Sydney on Sunday but then opted for an overnight train, getting me there on Monday morning, giving us time to check out a flying site near Gundowring in the Kiewa Valley and Kieran’s local team playing in Albury.

The train to Sydney stopped a lot more often than I expected for an overnight service, but then it wasn’t a sleeper and only one of two trains through that day so I guess it had to. Anyway, 8 sleep-deprived hours later (partly my own fault for now having a laptop with wireless internet) I was back in Sydney, and being familiar with the trains and buses made getting to Bondi a breeze. A couple of days of doing basically nothing followed, and I was pretty much OK with that. With 3 months left in Australia, and 46 days work to knock off before being eligible I was starting to feel a bit more pressure to get a farm job so I idly checked out the government website, noticing a tractor driving job: just the kind of job I’d been wanting all year, seeing as I’m not just lazy but can actually drive a tractor.

Bright

Even though the job had only been posted that day, I didn’t fancy my chances as I called the recruitment agency, but they told me to send over a CV so I enthusiastically obliged. Next morning, having heard nothing (I had sent the CV not long before COB though) I called to check up on the job and was told to expect a call from the farmer: great. Daryl, the farmer, called back and checked what experience I had and, although I was lacking in the way of mechanical or welding experience, he seemed happy to take me on.

So here I am, finally blogging in the present, on a train to Moree, having, partly out of hunger, but mainly out of boredom, already eaten a steak pie and roast-pork dinner only 2 ½ hours into an 8 ½ hour journey watching my first taste of new Australian countryside rush past my window for the first time in 3 months. Really this title is a bit misdirecting: if this job works out I’ll have moved from one long-term location to another with only a few days in between where I’ve been ‘backpacking’.

28 April 2010

Finding My Flying Feet and Learning to Soar

After what was nothing short of an amazing introduction to paragliding on Saturday, we quickly got into the routine of driving up hills and running off them. Sunday morning was spent at the Pines – a site near Myrtleford that was good when the wind turned southerly – and for the afternoon, and all of Monday, we had the legendary ‘Old’ Bill deliver the course theory to us. Bill – who is, in fact, old enough to justify his name – falls into the category of one of the best teachers I’ve ever had, sitting alongside legends such as Mr Anderson, my history teacher. With a history of captaining ships in the merchant navy to flying sail-planes, he backed up almost every piece of theory with a comical anecdote that made digesting the fairly dry aviation theory so much easier.

Tuesday saw us back at the Pines, where I was still having trouble running out my launches, converting the last metre of descent into forward motion to save my now quite sore feet, which was a worry. Also bad habits were creeping into my launch technique, resulting in me launching my wing into a tree, luckily with no harm to the wing or me. We made a return to Mystic on Wednesday – after the very short descent from the top of the hill at pines, the flagship launch site felt perilously high again – and on my third flight, I finally got up the courage to land myself.

Up until this point, as I came in on my final approach the instructor on the ground would tell me exactly when to flare – or pull my brakes as hard as could in other words – the glider, so it would pitch back and land as softly as possible, but it’s very hard, even as a skilled observer, to judge exactly when to call the flare over the radio, as not only do you not experience the landing air conditions first hand, but also have to judge how long the pupil will take to respond to your call, so my landings tended to be harder than they needed to be. All these hard landings and sore feet had me genuinely worried that I might be doing some damage and had me doubting whether I’d be able to keep up with the sport if I couldn’t land safely, but as soon as I started judging the flare myself, my landings turned into something of an art and I finally felt comfortable with the sport.

It’s quite scary to think that, up until this point, I was committed to an intensive and costly course based on having enjoyed flying a sail-plane a few times and admiring the photography of a para-motor pilot from Inverness, so it was more than a minor relief to finally, confidently say I was loving what I was doing.

At lunch that day, the other Bill (Bright has a serious problem with everyone having the same name) took me for a tandem flight which turned into my first ever thermalling experience, and took the course to a whole new level of amazement. Just a minute off the launch, Bill steered us into the first thermal that took us hundreds of metres above launch, just far enough for me to be thankful that he’d told me to wear a coat, and for the next forty minutes we cruised above Mystic, the Wandiligong Valley, and Reliance Ridge. It was also my first time taking a camera with me – I wasn’t quite bold enough to take my 50d this time, but still, my 350d doesn’t exactly fall into the dispensable category, especially with a 10-20mm lens bolted to the front of it – so most of the flight was spend glued to it, savouring my first experience of unrestricted aerial photography.

Thursday saw me really getting into the flying, emulating yesterday’s tandem flight with a 40 minute solo flight of my own: my first time above launch on my own. I’d spent most of the day before that, seething as I watched my unfortunate flight timing miss all the thermals that were then so clearly marked out by the other students circling and rocketing skywards in. Friday, although not as unstable as Thursday, saw me starting to feel the lift and maintain height in thermals on my own. Saturday was bitter-sweet: our last day of flying and I didn’t catch any good thermals, but I did get to see Al (short for Albania, as none of us could pronounce his real name), a rather big guy who seemed to sink out of the sky on every flight, finally catch a thermal and experience what we’d been raving about for days: the smile on his face was priceless.

Sunday was exam day: multiple choice can only be so hard, unless the questions are worded stupidly, so even though I got 98% I still contested the 2 frustratingly vague questions that cost me my geeky ace-crown. Then it was time to say goodbye to Kieran, Kieren, Brad and Al and say goodbye to paragliding for a while to deal with the pressures of the real world. But wait, I’m a backpacker with no job, nor schedule, so for me it was only the beginning of my flying career in Bright…

27 April 2010

Today, I Learn to Fly

Saturday, 13th February 2010

This was it: the day I was going to learn how to throw myself off a hill and soar into the clouds. Ted picked me up in time for the 8.30 start at the school and we met the other 4 guys who were also in for 9 days of awesomeness. Before we could get down to the serious business of matching the right size wings to the right pupils, there was the small issue of sorting out what we would each be called, seeing as 3 of the 5 of us were called Kieran. For once in my life I didn’t bother promoting my nickname, so I got to keep my real name, or to keep things clear(ish) when talking on the radios, I was ‘Kieran-that-is-Kieran’. After doing the usual signing our lives away to the school and the HGFA, we hit the road, heading to the Reeds training slope.

The training hill is sloped just enough to let us charge down it, as we are launching, but without dropping away from us so much that we end up suspended in the air high enough that we could do much harm if we pulled a control too hard. Bill, one of the instructors, showed us the forward launch technique then we got hooked into harnesses and tried it ourselves. Forward launching is the easiest way to launch: basically just run forward and the wing that’s attached behind you is thrust into the air and flies forward above your head, much like what a kite would do if you faced away from it and ran forward. The trick then is to balance running speed and brake pressure on the wing to keep it from overtaking you, or falling back down behind you. My first attempt looked good: wing up above me nicely, running down the hill, then for some reason I stopped running so fast and the wing mercilessly overtook me, leaving nothing for me to do but nose-dive into the ground with such determination that I became an instant contender for the bloopers video compilation.

After lunch it was time to fly, thankfully not solo just yet though. Up at Mystic launch, Adam – the instructor who was going to take me for my tandem flight – unpacked the wing we were about to fly the 400m down to the landing paddock, while I took measure of fairly sizeable drop in front of me and felt excitement give way to adrenaline and nerves. Even though my part in the launch was simple – when told to run, run, and don’t stop, not even when you think you’re in the air, until told to – I was still weighing up the chance of me not running right, tripping us both up and rolling down the rock-strewn hill-side. Now strapped into the harness which was in turn attached to the paraglider and my instructor’s harness, I was standing on launch, looking straight out over Bright below, eyes fixed on my target, waiting for the call…and go! Leaning forward into a run, I took one step, two steps, maybe a third, then I was just running in the air, and before I knew it Adam was telling me to get comfortable in the seat of the harness. It had taken 5 seconds to go from standing like a turkey on launch to floating through the air, wind blowing past my ears, totally at ease with the fact my instructor and I were suspended from a glorified piece of tent by a few dozen bits of string each about a millimetre thick.

The conditions were calm and stable, meaning we had roughly 5 minutes in the air as we glided along the ridge extending towards the landing area. Adam passed the controls over and let me steer the wing, bringing it over the paddock and flying a figure-of-eight formation to loose height over the downwind end of the field, before we came down, fairly gently, in the middle of the paddock. Before any of us had time to reflect on what we’d just done, Ted came over and coyly asked ‘now do you want to do that on your own?!’, and in a moment of blind courage we all said ‘hell yeah!’.

Back up at launch, the fact that I’d just successfully flown down from here did nothing to calm my nerves, as this time it was all on me: nobody to launch, and nobody to fall back if it went wrong. Glider unpacked, rolled out, lines untangled and checked, harness strapped in, checked and re-checked, harness attached to glider, brakes and risers in hand, and I was ready, watching the wind streamers down the slope, waiting for the wind to blow steadily up the face of the launch, and then Ted came across the radio Run! And I was off. Leaning forward I felt the wing rising up behind me, a little crooked but I could still hear Ted repeatedly saying run so I kept going, then run, run, release and I released the risers, but now the wing felt as though it was overtaking me – not a good scenario – Ted was now a little more insistent RUN!, but I could feel the wing struggling to stay aloft now that I’d let it get ahead of me, and I hesitated to run further down the slope, although I already felt that at this point I was in for a rough tumble down the hill if the wing didn’t fly. Ted, seeing that things were past the point of a safe first-take off came through the radio ok, ok, abort, pull down hard on both brakes, but I was now at the edge of the astro-turf launch and entering the steeper, rough part of the slope. Doing as I was told, I pulled the brakes down past my waist – theoretically stalling the glider so it would fall behind me – but instead of stopping, the glider filled with life, lifting me just off my feet so only my toes could vainly try to gain some purchase on the ground that was fast falling away from me. For a second, I looked at the ground, down the rough slope, over the hundreds of pine trees that I was heading for, dangling in suspense, not falling, but not quite flying, as I was still choking the wing’s desire to fly with the brakes. Ted called through brakes up, and then I was flying, not struggling down the hill with a half inflated balloon tied to my back, but actually flying.

It took a few seconds to digest what had just happened, as I dangled in the running position in my harness, watching the ground now steadily falling away from me and the air beginning to rush past my face. After that I was a robot, Ted may as well have been holding a radio-controlled joystick as I followed each of his commands – get comfortable in your harness, a little more brakes, turn right 40 degrees, keep that heading – but after a minute, I was flying out over the spur of Emily ridge, taking a few seconds to enjoy the view – Wandiligong valley to the right; Bright to the left – now being guided down by Adam in the landing paddock. The rest was fairly simple, although coming in to land, the nerves edged up a little, and I found myself not running out the landing and having quite sore feet because of it.

The timings of the troop-carrier’s runs up the hill meant that Kip and I got the chance of a second solo flight before the light faded, and thankfully that launch went a lot more smoothly than the first, although the landing was just as heavy as the first. The 3 Kierans all ended up staying at the hostel, and high from our day’s achievements, we headed to the Bright Brewery for a celebratory pint.

26 April 2010

Chasing the Dream

Finally, the day was here: I was leaving Melbourne and heading back to the alpine region, to Bright, where I’d finally realise what I’d been dreaming about doing for the last 12 months. Travelling anywhere new, or at least less visited, almost always excites me, usually resulting in me being ready for the journey way earlier than I need to be. Up at 6, I was a bit early for the free breakfast that the International Hostel on Elizabeth Street puts on, but the guy looking after the reception was nice enough to drag the breakfast set out early for me so I didn’t have to endure a few hours of my stomach screaming at me. The train wasn’t due to leave till 8.15 but, partly due to my airport-conditioning to always be early, and partly due to getting to use the trams for free as part of my train ticket, I was in the station not long after 7.30 and so begun my day of unnecessary waiting.

About 30 minutes on the train, I was getting settled in as the train slowed down – presumably for the first station – thinking that $27 was pretty good for the distance I was going compared to the prices back home, especially since it covered trams in the Melbourne as well as a train and a bus to get to Bright. A minute later, the train was now clearly not slowing down but just coasting to a stand-still, although the engines were still running. Two hours later, still sitting on the train that the driver and a few engineers now admitted wasn’t just blocking most trains north-bound from Melbourne, but was also completely broken down, we finally got to jump off and switch to a bus that would complete the leg of the journey that the train so miserably failed to over. 4 hours and a comically expensive taxi fare later (comical, as it cost more than what all the people on it would have paid V-Line for their tickets), I was in Bright.

Bigger than I expected, Bright, with its clock-tower and war memorial dominating the town square, was the closest thing to a British village I’d yet seen in Australia. Being set in rolling forested hills that also could have been somewhere in the UK, it felt like the kind of place I could happily settle down in for a while. Walking into the Bright Hikers hostel, I was met with a closed reception and the quietest accommodation I’ve ever set foot in. Luckily Davide, who turned out to have just finished last month’s paragliding licence course, and his girlfriend, Aiste, were kicking about and were fairly sure what dorm I’d be sleeping in so I got settled in and, in the healthiest form of lazy comfort eating I could think of in Bright, I headed to Subway.

In the evening, as people came back from flying and working, I met a few of the more long-term residents of the hostel, namely Steve, who was also finishing off his paragliding licence course, and Steve, who was working for the local fire service. Next day I cycled to the landing paddocks with Davide and met Ted, owner of Alpine Paragliding, before we drove to the top of Mystic – a hill overlooking Bright which offers consistently good thermalling, and the place where most flights take place on – to watch Davide launching into the air. The view from the launch at Mystic’s peak is stunning, and watching Davide pulling the wing into the air, then so fluently stepping off the hill and floating into the vista was awe-inspiring, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t for a second doubt that I could pull off such a stunt in two days.

Friday was spent wandering round town, which really was quite beautiful, even before the autumn colours came on and turned it into what it looked like in all the postcards. There are so many parks and, in keeping with one of my favourite Australian traditions, each one had numerous bbqs as well as plenty space to chill out and contemplate, in ever increasing excitement, that tomorrow, I was going to learn to fly.