Flying in foothills of himalayas (October 10-17, 2008)

Just got back from an awesome paragliding trip to Bir/Billing. Bir is a small tibetian village located in Himachal Pradesh. Himachal Pradesh promotes various adventure sports such as paragliding, white water rafting, hiking/trekking etc.  As part of it, they organize a paragliding fly-in and competition every year around October.

The flying site is truely world class! I have flown at various sites around the world including a paragliding cross country paradise in Mexico at Valley De Bravo. Out of all the sites I have flown, Bir/Billing stands out to be the most consistent and with biggest potential. The thermals were big and still smooth. There were plenty of birds to mark out thermals. 

I chose the costliest but quickest way to reach Bir. I flew to Delhi and then took a flight to Dharamshala. From Dharamshala I had to pay Rs. 1100 for the taxi to take me to Bir. The drive to Bir took about 2 hours. There are cheaper ways to reach Bir  but they take much much longer. The most popular way is to reach Pathankot by train and then take a taxi to Bir. Pathankot to Bir by taxi takes almost 4 hours.

Himachal Pradesh government oraganizes the flyin and I was pleasantly surprised how welcome paragliders were in this remote portion of India. We lived in Bir which is a small village mostly occupied by monks from Tibet. There are many monasteries in Bir which are worth seeing. 

From Bir, you can hire a taxi to go up to launch. The cost of the taxi comes to about Rs. 100 per person with a glider. The road to launch is relatively very good and it takes about 45 minutes to drive up to launch. We usually had a good breakfast in the morning and drove to launch. Thermals started popping around 10:45am or so. We usually launched at around 11:30am. Then depending upon your appetite for thermals, you could stay up as much as 4 hours. While we were there we had low cloud base and we routinely used to reach cloudbase. Then we used to fly out to avoid flying in clouds! Cross country flying of over 50 kms is pretty common on most days. We went up for couple of evening flights and they were superb.

There is so much more to write about this relatively unknown paragliding place....however I will stop here with some pictures and videos of the trip. Feel free to send me an email if you have any questions about flying in Bir/Billing.

More photos at Bir Billing Oct 2008

And now some videos....

Mike and his  brother launching in white out conditions. They flew for over 7 minutes in clouds before they could see land. They did have compass to fly with and obviously they are very very good paraglider pilots!

Here is Pawan doing a forward launch. Pawan only had few hours before coming to Bir. But he did outstandingly well in terms of catching thermals and staying up!

Here is Dipankar flying next to me. Behind you can see tall mountains with fresh snow on them.

Here is me coming in for landing. The background songs are not my choice. Himachal Pradesh tourism was playing them in the LZ! :) (video courtesy, Dipankar)

US Economic crisis : Warren Buffett on Charlie Rose

I am sure you are getting bombarded with lot of media material about current US economic crisis. The numbers that are being discussed are just unfathomably high! It is indeed an unprecedented situation and kind of a perfect storm that has been brewing for long time. 

If you are even remotely interested in how US economy affects you, I would recommend investing one hour of your time to view Warren Buffet talk about it here. It is a gem of an interview by Charlie Rose where Warren Buffet slices and dices the current situation and gives his candid views. This guy is really good and knows what he is talking about. My respect for him grew many fold after seeing this interview. Here are some of the pearls from his conversation,

i would rather be approximately right rather than precisely wrong! -Warren on the need of having a $700 billion bail out plan devised quickly.

Be greedy when everyone else is fearful and be fearful when everyone else is greedy! -Warren when asked why he is investing now when everyone is selling their positions.

We are trading away piece of our country every day! (America imports more than it exports, more specifically $2 billion every day. So someone else in the world owns $2 billion of America every single day!) -Warren on how to fix the US economic engine in the long run

another SaaS utility

Slowly but surely SaaS (software as a service) is becoming part of my everyday life. Here is a fun example of how a website provides a simple service to take a photo and turn it into professional looking vintage avatars! Here are some of the cool year book photos it created for me. More funny avatars are available here. The coolest thing about this service is that it is entirely over the web. This is the first time I actually manipulated a photo over the web and the overall experience was very impressive. This goes to prove that SaaS is slowly but surely becoming suitable for service delivery over the web!