Parapente!

The next morning, we left Cafayate and drove back to Tucumán to catch our next overnight bus. We had planned, last minute, a paragliding expedition for that afternoon. However, we lost phone contact with the paragliding guide en route to the hill and didn’t know exactly where to meet him. We decided to just drive up the hill, where all the paragliding takes place, and find somewhere along the way. We stopped at the first sign for parapente that we saw. After driving down a tiny little path, we found ourselves in a clearing where tons of paragliders were hanging out and taking off. (In case you don’t know what paragliding is, it is where you walk off the side of a hill with a giant sail attached to you, and you fly. Beginners, of course, are attached to a professional). The paragliders were a unique group, decked out in dreadlocks and getting a huge high from running off the side of the mountain. They told us they could take us and we just had to wait a few minutes until someone was able to go. A few minutes turned into a few hours and they basically forgot about us until we said something. Bree was the first to go, followed by me. Surprisingly, paragliding was not scary at all. When in the air, it hardly felt like I was moving. It was very tranquil and relaxing. Due to the conditions, we couldn’t land in the same place we took off from, so we had to land at the bottom of the hill in a random lemon grove. When I landed, I found Bree waiting down there. We then had to wait for a ride to come to take us and the rest of the people who landed in the grove back up to the top of the hill. The paragliders were in no rush and were just hanging out in this grove, listening to music, smoking cigarettes and chatting. Bree and I started to get a little worried about how long it was taking and realizing that we had no way of contacting the guys and really had no clue who these paragliders were. Finally, a car came to get us, we jammed in the back seat, and drove back up to the top of the hill to find our very worried boyfriends, worried because it had been hours since they had seen us and they had no contact information for the people we jumped off the hill with. It all worked out, except that because it took so long that Scott & Steve couldn’t go- but it’s okay because we think they would have thought it was boring anyways J