Well, every year hundreds of free flying souls take to the skies for a colorful spectacle.
It's the World Paragliding Championships and our weekend adventure heads up, up and away
this morning to Vaya de Bravo, Mexico to check it out.
There was a friend who came from the Alps, it was 1986, 1987 and he had a tiny little
bag thing that could somehow fly and it was called a paraglider.
We started to play with this on the foothills, on the eastern slopes of the Rockies.
The first second my foot left the ground I realized this was going to be a problem.
All I could do is think about flying, I dream about flying laying in the bed.
Looking back on it of course it was horrifying to think how easy it would have been to broken
our necks, but we didn't and so here we are right now at the World Championships, the cutting
edge of humans trying to be birds.
Going to the air you need to be brave for sure, at least the second time if you keep
on doing it that means you have to take responsibility and know what you're doing and try to not
be too scared and enjoy it.
It's your mind and your vision that changes your outcome more than anything, keeping yourself
going, keeping yourself positive.
It's a strange sport that where there's nothing like it, it's like instant karma in the way
you think and the way it responds.
Paragliding is one of the sports especially from the ground that's extremely benign.
When you're in the air it can be very much the opposite, the condensation of power that
is everywhere around you is incredible.
So here we are flying around on what looks like a little fluffy piece of nylon but it
actually has an incredible amount of power.
We knew it was going to be strong, we knew it was going to be long, it was going to be
very physical, this is some of the strongest term you can find.
When we're given a task, as we are today, perhaps well over 100 kilometers zigzagging
through the mountains and canyons with these kind of people, these 3D chests, reading the
clouds, reading the terrain and very much reading the psychology and the pace of the
other pilots, you obviously get drawn further than you would flying on your own.
If we were to see what was happening with the air molecules, we probably wouldn't even
leave the ground.
When strong climbs, people have recorded over 20 meters per second of lift, so that means
you're going up it close to 60 miles an hour.
There's megawatts of power, gigawatts of power that we don't see, they start right out there,
we just go into it and we just go out.
It's not just physics, it's life, it's part of the earth breathing.
The level of intensity is very high, you're flying a glider that flies at 70 kilometers
an hour.
You're flying each other at 100 plus kilometers an hour, wingtip to wingtip, and you're in
a gaggle under a cloud.
People ask me all the time at work, well how do you manage to do that, so how do you manage
not to do that, really?
It's not the result that really matters, it's the friendship we're building together
between all these pilots from all over the world.
Life is quite forgiving a lot of the time, you can get away with a lot of adventures
with a smile on your face and live well and probably not ever take a nick, hopefully.
