Words & Photographs by Lily C. Fen
Taking off on a tandem paragliding flight was like riding a rollercoaster, only seventy-seven times amplified.
The wind catches your chute and extricates you from the pull of gravity as you run pell-mell into the big blue, off the tip of Gaisberg, the paragliding favorite in all of Salzburg. It felt like a death-defying moment.
But I get ahead of myself.
Photo: Bright blue skies and rich green at the top of Gaisberg, as I contemplate the paragliders above me who have taken off before me.
Before we got off the ground, we started our visit to Salzburg with the music of Mozart, who was born here.
Our first stop is his birthplace, Mozarts Geburtshaus. His father, Leopold, was an up-and-coming violinist and composer. This home was a humble affair-- about 15 square meters for each room and floor.
Second was a grander set of residences, known today as Mozart Wohnhaus, where he and his family resided as their musical careers garnered more recognition.
Here, I learned that Mozart had composed the renowned The Marriage of Figaro by the time he was thirty, debuting in Vienna. A year later, the highly acclaimed Don Giovanni premiered in Prague.
Besides all things Mozart, Salzburg was also an adventure in the air.
This tiny town is nestled in among five peaks: Untersberg, Mönchsberg, Kapuzinerberg, Nonnberg, and Gaisberg.
Up on the latter, I found myself strapped to a giant harness, with a great chute trailing behind me. My partner for the tandem flight, nearly twice my height and weight, was also attached to a twin harness, tied to me.
His instructions: “You must run. When I tell you to run, go like your life depends on it, even if you are afraid, or we will crash into the trees! Run until you no longer feel the ground underneath your feet.”
The slope we were standing on was a patchy green off which dozens of other paragliding enthusiasts were beginning their flights, behaving like brave eagles in splashes of cobalt blue and strawberry red. I gulped.
“The only time I ever had an accident with a female passenger was when I told her to run, and she paused, mid-way, just a hair before the trees, afraid we would hurtle into them.”
Hesitating as she did, they had crashed, chute and all, into the evergreens.
“So don’t do that,” he smiled at me reassuringly, as if that would assuage my fear of plunging off a steep mountain.
I was about to jump off this great mound and leap into empty air.
It went beyond my survival senses and deep instincts to live.
We did a test run, where he hung on to me by the straps of my beige harness, and I got my legs going. I was kind of like a gerbil on a wheel. When it was time, he shouted, “Run!”
View from the top: A bird’s eye view of Salzburg, Austria, as seen from Hohensalzburg Fortress.
I moved my legs as fast as they would go, off the slope of that reassuring grass, off the soft earth that was underneath it, and went straight for the trees, not caring if I would smash into them, chute and all.
I kept on, my legs chugging and chugging even until I could no longer feel there was any land beneath me.
The chute had caught the wind, and we had done it.
We had lifted off.
We were off the ground, we were in the air, we were riding the wind!
The sensation made me imagine that I was a tiny leaf riding pockets of hot and cold air. Our wind reader blipped, informing us if we were managing to let the wind take us up, or if we were losing power and descending.
It was otherworldly to feel no earth under my feet, only space.
My paragliding master comforted me like he was talking to a frightened child, “Now we know what it feels like to be the birds, to see what they see.”
The wind was volatile.
Sometimes it took our chute, whisking us into greater heights over the mountaintops. At times it would drop us and let us go, and we would plummet by what felt like an entire meter or two.
I could see all the other paragliders harnessing the wind, some alone in their chutes, others, like me, trying it out for the first time with a guide.
Walter, my instructor from Crocodile Sports, said that he loved descending in loops, but that some passengers did not do well with this and preferred to go straight down. He asked me what I wanted, and I said we could go for what he liked. I was curious as to how that would feel like.
That turned out to be a mistake.
My stomach lurched as we hurtled through the air.
We swooped down into an open field, descending in what felt like figure eights, or a zigzag pattern that left my mind and my belly whirling uncomfortably.
Our feet mercifully touched the ground, and we skidded into the grass. We had left the speed of the wind and slowed down into the stillness of gravity and the earth.
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