Today we had breakfast at about 8:15 and left to go paragliding. A van picked us up from the school and we drove about 45 minutes to Chinchero. On the way we talked to the guide who was going paragliding with me. He knew a pretty good amount of English and we knew a little Spanish, so we could communicate pretty well. He told us that the people who live in those areas practice communal farming where one person watches all of the kids so everyone else can farm and do other jobs. He also told us about the potatoes being laid out in the sun. The most interesting thing that he told us was that in some of the towns near there, women braid their hair differently depending on their marital status. If they are single, they have more then one braid. If they are married they have one long braid.
Once we got to the place we were going to leave from we looked around and watched them set up the stuff. The area were we were leaving had a little store and a lot of tour buses stopping because you could get great views of the Urubamba River Valley. Once the wind was blowing in the right direction. We put on our pack/seat things (you put them on like a backpack but are more like a seat) and the instructor told me what to do. Then we got hooked up to the kite and started running to the edge of the cliff. The sail didn’t catch the wind right so we stopped running and backed up and waited for about ten minutes. Then we started running. Luckily the sail caught the wind after we had run ten feet or so (which was pretty hard being hooked together and having the huge seat things on our backs). We sat down in the seats and we were off! We got an amazing view of the Urubamba River Valley and into another valley. We also got to go pretty close to a glacier up on one of the mountains. After we had been in the air for 20 minutes or so it was time to land. We circled around the field we were going to land in as we got lower. We glided into the field and landed. It was a very smooth landing. The only problem was that the field had just been irrigated was pretty wet. Then we packed up the sail and carried everything to the nearest road and waited for about a minute until the van came to pick us up.
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