Wingchina

welcome flying in China

By Gabriel Al-Salem (gabriel_alsalem@yahoo.com)

When I first read that there was a paragliding site at the Great Wall, I did a serious double-take and had to re-read the info before it sank in. I know how lucky all of us are simply to be alive when individual human flight has become a reality, but to fly over the Great Wall of China? After a thrilling two hours of ridge soaring and thermalling at Simatai northeast of Beijing, I can say that not only is there flying site at the Wall, but a truly world-class one. What's more, the Chinese pilots are a jolly bunch who are eager to show their country and its numerous flying sites. And they sure know how to eat well after a flight!

Not knowing what kind of flying to expect at the Great Wall, I took the first hints from the picture on my Chinese visa. The image stamped in my passport showed a hilly landscape dominated by a wall snaking along one of the ridges, climbing along improbably steep slopes, rising from low river valleys to jagged summits. Perfect for ridge soaring, I thought. What awaited me was more stunning than any photo - or article - can convey. A first visit to the Great Wall of China is an encounter with millennia of history that, if you think about it, can be fairly overwhelming. 2,000 years went into building various sections, and by the time it was unified into single barrier in 221 B.C., spanning 3,750 miles, it had consumed the labor of more than a million people. But my thoughts, after the first moments of amazement, were less on the history than on how to gain altitude from the launch site, about two-thirds of the way up the slope, and where the best pockets of lift might be found along the uneven yellow cliffs that form the top of the ridge. What I wasn't anticipating were soarable thermals, but I should have been. Beneath the wall and its famous watch towers, the slope at Simatai is well exposed to the sunlight and prevailing winds, and dark rock mixed with dry scree among thick patches of vegetation are excellent thermal sources.

I met up in the morning with Howard Yin and my other newfound friends at the office of the Flying Man club in northern Beijing. From there, we traveled the easy two-and-a-half hours to Simatai, first passing bicycle rickshaws and wedding convoys on the orderly streets of Beijing and then everything from three-wheeled motor scooters to big rig trucks on modern superhighways. Weeping willows lined the smaller roads as we got closer to our destination, making the scenery look a lot like the landscape paintings in your neighborhood Chinese restaurant.

After arriving the at a little tourist bazaar and taking a look-see around the somewhat tight LZ, the day's main event started with a leisurely ride up the mountain, first on a ski lift with recorded traditional music and a tour guide's voice reciting what you always wanted to know about the Great Wall ("…the minimum distance between the watch towers is 50 meters, the maximum distance 300 meters and the average distance 100 meters…") and then on a funicular that saves you the hike up the last few hundred meters. From there, the tourists take a little zigzag path up to the Wall itself and the paraglider pilots haul their gear up a final couple of minutes to the launch site. We took our packs off and assessed the day's conditions: good sunlight, a near constant breeze coming slightly from the right of launch and gusts coming in reliable thermal cycles - perfect.

The launch site is one of those hillsides that looks like it's slanted 45 degrees while it's really only about 30. Howard's main launch advice was "Don't overshoot" - a botched take-off would probably mean a tumble through the weeds. Shen was the first to get in the air, selflessly showing the rest of us where the limits of the day's soaring were. We watched him first gain some altitude to the right and then go a bit too far left downwind at too low an altitude to make it back. He struggled into the headwind for a while but finally made a U-turn when he saw it was hopeless and wound up getting a lift back to the LZ on a friendly farmer's tractor. I was starting to doubt whether I would get those views of the Great Wall from above after all.

A few more pilots launched, among them Lee, who found lift to the right of launch and was up above the wall in minutes. Right, I thought, that's what I've got to do. I spread out my Sport 2, hooked in and started waiting for the perfect gust. Howard lifted up the center of my glider and, after a moment, said, "Good wind!" After a less than ideal launch that left a knee-high weed stuck in my lines, I was in the air, heading into the wind in search of updrafts. It became obvious that I would have to do some serious work before reverting to my role of photo-snapping (but now airborne!) tourist. With Shen's and Lee's examples in mind, I headed as far to the right into the wind as I dared, praying all the while that my vario would start beeping. When it did, I was feeling good just about going up rather than down, but I also noticed that I would have to get pretty close to the terrain to make maximum use of the dynamic lift that there was. I did exaggerated figure eights, trying at each switch-back to maintain my position in the narrow column of lift scraping up the slope.

It was while I was trying to squeeze all of the altitude I could out of this first opportunity, facing the slope at every turn in the figure eight, that I first caught sight of the Wall from the air, when I had just managed to get level with it. I made the mistake of allowing myself to gaze at it and almost immediately lost the lift. Already by this point, though, I had seen enough of the slope from the air to be confident that I would be able to gain even more altitude further upwind and so I headed there right away. With the height that I gained at the end of the ridge, I headed back downwind for my first bit of fly-by sightseeing of the day, and I was not disappointed.

The Great Wall below me was just as it was depicted on my visa and in the hundreds of other images I had seen of it in my life. All I could say was "Wow," and, believe me, I said it out loud. It was nothing less than moving to view this massive human accomplishment from such a privileged vantage point - a vantage point made possible by another major human achievement, that of personal flight. Small groups of tourists stared upwards at us, and it didn't take much imagination to see them as Ming Dynasty foot soldiers patrolling the Wall to protect their great empire from the nomadic tribes to the north.

But my moments of reflection were brief because the search for dynamic lift continued, and I rode the steady waves of air up and down the ridge, stealing glimpses of the wall when I could while staying mostly level with it. Until, out of nowhere, my vario announced the presence of a serious thermal. Convinced that it must be a bubble that I would surely fly through in a couple of seconds, I didn't recognize it as a soarable thermal until I saw the terrain - and the Wall with it - drop sharply away. By that time, my vario was screaming "5 meters per second!" at me, and I saw that it was safe to do a full 360. I cleared the top of the ridge and for the first time was flying over the Wall. Somehow, I wasn't quite willing to believe that I was where I was, but there was no time for wonderment because this thermal was of the bucking bronco variety, and the wind, which by then had picked considerably, made the upward ride a mind game in the visualization of a tilted, drifting column that I wanted to stay in at all costs. I gambled right by spiraling in an elongated oval pattern, and within minutes had climbed 700 meters and could easily glide over to the highest point of the Wall at Simatai, about 1,000 meters above sea level or 700 meters above the LZ in the river valley below.

Here, where the ridge becomes so steep that the Great Wall's engineers had to develop a step-shaped design to accommodate the landscape, the whole enterprise of building an uninterrupted barrier along thousands of kilometers became all the more incredible. At the same time, it was precisely from the high point that I had reached that I could fully see the Wall extend from one horizon to the other. Seeing is believing, but grasping the scope of the Great Wall of China is a challenge even for an eyewitness.

What followed was a two-hour flight that has already gained the status of "magical" among my lifetime memories. Lee, Howard and I meandered above the remnants of the Wall together, and, especially as conditions got smoother toward the evening, our flight had the feeling of a leisurely stroll through a historical site. Tourists were nowhere to be seen on the upper sections, and the Wall itself, ancient and overgrown, takes on the appearance of a medieval ruin. The views became mistier as the sun sank in the evening sky, and my attention was drawn to the ridges upon ridges of green hill country extending in all directions. Simatai would be a stunning paragliding site even without the Great Wall.

Once on the ground, the attention of my new friends quickly turned to another great Chinese achievement - food. Our group of 8 had a meal fit for en emperor at a nearby lakeside restaurant for under 20 US dollars, and I saw how the Chinese turn every meal into a feast. Oversized bottles of Yanjing beer added to my contentment, and the huge plates of fish, meats, veggies and rice in superb sauces seemed like a just reward for all of us. In my two days in Beijing, I ate parts of ducks and pigs that I never knew were edible and saw how the longest noodles in Beijing are made in the restaurant belonging to Wong, another of the pilots in the Flying Man club. We left each table looking like a battlefield littered with peanut shells, bones and discarded chopsticks.

During those lively meals, I learned of the other paragliding sites throughout China, some of which are still being explored. The country is still a mystery to me, but now I at least know about the legendary XC flying in Linzhou (where a PWC was held in 2004), good weekend flying near Beijing at the Ming Tombs, and several sites around Hong Kong. And the Great Wall of China will always be waiting at Simatai, a site that surely ranks among the most captivating in the world.

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