My paragliding day in Bavaria was almost perfect, probably the best day of my holiday. My paragliding adventure took place in the morning.
I was flying from Wallberg at Rottach Egern at around 10am. I did get slightly lost trying to find the paragliding site, I put the name of the mountain in the sat nav and ended up at a ski school! I rang the paragliding pilot, he gave directions to the landing field and from there we were going to the cable car at Wallberg which had amazing views of the Bavarian and Austrian Alps.
There were 2 bags of equipment for the tandem paraglide, that looked like a lot of stuff! I was telling Hagen, my pilot, about tandem hang-gliding in New Zealand and the Canyon Swing in Queenstown and doing a static line parachute jump in England as a student. He said I was obviously an adventurer.
The Wallberg cable car up the mountain is one of those small ones that takes about 4 people, one that you sit down in and much better than the bigger ones where you all stand up and cram inside. I actually didn’t think we would get in there with the equipment as well, but we managed. It took about half an hour to get to the top of the mountain and I loved the cable car journey up there. We walked to the second take off site which was higher up because of the winds and the view up there was amazing. There were great views of the Zugspitze, the highest mountain in Germany and from this mountain we could see into the Austrian Alps and see the highest mountain in Austria too, the Grossglockner. We had climbed very high up on the cable car, the fact that it took half an hour to get up there meant we were high up. Hagen asked me if I was nervous. I admitted I was slightly nervous. Hagen said he wasn’t nervous. Since he was the instructor, I took this as a good sign! But I soon forgot my nerves as I got kitted out in my flying suit.
As for the paperwork, there wasn’t any! It’s the first time I’ve ever done an activity like this and not had to sign my life away. Hagen said a lot of people went paragliding in Turkey without thinking about safety and the fact that a lot of Turkish paragliding instructors don’t have good safety measures in place. He said that wasn’t the case with him, all of the instructors in Germany had to have liability insurance. I told Hagen I backed out of a tandem hang-glide in Brazil when the pilot forged a passport number for me because I didn’t know it and my passport was in the hotel safe, insisted on me paying cash, was vague about how much he wanted me to pay and when I said I didn’t have much cash on me, I was expecting to pay by credit card, he said he would take me to a cash machine after my flight. At that point I changed my mind. Too many warning bells! It wasn’t as if I hadn’t done a tandem hang-glide before, I’d done it with John the World Champion in New Zealand and with John I’d even done some aerobatics on the way down, we were doing barrel rolls, which I didn’t even realise you could do with a hang-glider, so I didn’t feel it necessary to risk life and limb with some Brazilian scoundrel who could drive me into a favela and leave me for dead!
Now I was a bit surprised that Hagen, my paragliding pilot in Germany, was an older bloke, but I was reassured that with age, no doubt, comes experience and he would be a good person to fly with. And he was, he really looked after me and made me feel relaxed. Once I was kitted out, he explained to me how we were going to take-off, he said it wasn’t quite the same as hang-gliding. He said with hang-gliding you have to run as fast as you can and not stop, just keep running off the edge of the mountain. But as a paraglider has a chute and isn’t on a fixed frame like a hang-glider, first we had to take 3 big steps to get the chute in the air. He explained as the chute billowed up it would try to pull me back so I had to keep leaning forward, it was important that I didn’t fall over and then run and just keep running, even if I thought we had taken off. I’m more than capable of running as fast as I can off the edge of a mountain so that part wasn’t a problem. Hagen got me to take steps forward and then he pulled me back to simulate the sensation of the chute to prepare me. He set up the paraglider and called me down the hill, much further down than I expected to take off.
In fact, probably the most nerve racking moment for me was making my way down the fairly steep slope to where Hagen was. He hooked me up and then the wind dropped completely so we had to wait a minute for the wind to build up a bit.
When it did build up again, he said take 3 big steps, I managed to stay upright although it was difficult and then he shouted run, run, run! And I kept running as fast as I could and although I was never built for speed, the speed I managed was good enough. And that was it, we were up and away, he said “good girl”, the people watching said “wow”! And that was it, we were flying.
It was much better than the appalling attempts at take-off I’d seen at Tegelberg the day before, it took some of them 3 attempts to get in the air! I was told that the wind conditions there were usually quite challenging and it was a difficult location to take off from. Hagen had a camera on a stick to take photos and a video. He took photos first and then video of the second half of the flight.
We were bumping around a bit in the air after take-off because even though it was a glorious, warm, clear, sunny day, we were in a westerly wind, Hagen said that made it bumpy, but we weren’t in any danger. But I wasn’t worried. I trusted he knew was he was doing and a few bumps didn’t bother me. We managed to catch some thermals and climbed higher than we’d been when we took off. It is the best way of seeing the mountains and the view of the lake below was amazing. He kept asking me if I was okay, I was fine, I was enjoying it. We were flying round for about half an hour before we started our descent. Hagen let me do some steering, when we were comfortably flying around in the thermals he handed me the strings to control our flight, so I had a go at soaring around to get my own views of the Bavarian Alps. However, after about half an hour the wind was starting to get stronger and it was beginning to get a bit more dangerous to be paragliding up there.
Finally, before we came in to land, not be outdone by World Champion hang-glider, John who had done the aerobatics for me on the way down, Hagen wanted to give me a thrilling descent with a paraglider. You can’t turn the paraglider upside down like the hang-glider. So instead we did some extreme corkscrew turns, which basically meant we were spinning round really fast as we descended. It took my breath away it was so fast, it was like being on a rollercoaster. It was fantastic, I loved it.
When we landed Hagen told me I was a crazy girl and it had been great flying with me. He said two thirds of his passengers would have been terrified in the bumpy conditions and they certainly wouldn’t have gone for the extreme corkscrew spinning on descent. But I wasn’t going to say no to any offers of extra thrills that could be thrown in on a flying adventure like this, that’s just not the kind of girl I am!
I travelled in Bavaria during the second week of May in 2015.
I went paragliding with the brilliant Paraworth Tandem Paragliding off Wallberg in the Bavarian Alps near Rottach Egern
I stayed at Hotel Kriemhild close to the Hirschgarten in Munich about an hour’s drive from Wallberg
I flew to Munich direct from Birmingham Airport with Lufthansa
Read about my other adventures on my trip to Bavaria and Austria.
Surreal Night at the Rattlesnake Saloon
Längenfeld Aqua Dome Spa
