Part 5: Taking to the skies from Iquique

  Iquique, Chile
Monday, April 6, 2009

Iquique has felt like home from the moment of arrival.
This is a small city trapped on a narrow sandy ledge between the Pacific Ocean to the west and the foot of a 500m high ridge to the east. Its also isolated in the middle of the desert because there is no greenery and is remote from any other large town or city for at least 200miles in all directions.

The accomodation is the only hostal visible on the internet to travellers, seeking accomodation, who have yet to arrive in Iquique. It is spacious, clean, well organised and a mecca for practically all english speaking travellers passing through so makes for a very sociable and relaxed atmosphere. Furthermore, it literally is only a minute's walk from the beach!
The city is Chile's equivalent to Brighton in terms of appearance from the front, being a seaside resort that is thankfully now out of season. That said, with clear blue skies taken for granted and daytime temperatures between 25 to 30 degrees C, it is the perfect place to relax for a few weeks after moving from place to place once every couple of days or so. Iquique has long beaches, palmtree lined seafront walks together with boardwalked pavements along cobbled streets that are lined with old wooden colonial style houses. There have been a number of people here who have made this there home for a fortnight even though they have nothing else to do other than just hang out on the beach.

Iquique offers surfing, sandboarding, a very small number of tourist distractions including the chance to visit the ghost town of Humberstone and last but certainly not least, paragliding, which is why I am here. I have wanted to be able to fly for as long as I can remember and paragliding is something that I have wanted to do ever since first becaming aware of it about 10 years ago.

The idea of being able to walk out through the front door with an aircraft on the back in a rucksack appeals very much. Also, being propelled by nothing more than just the thermals or the wind coming from the right direction makes this an environmentally friendly way to fly and furthermore it is probably the closest experience there is to soaring like a bird of prey.

The course started żżżż???? when I accompanied 2 others from the hostal, who had already been flying a week,  to the first of 2 launch sites being Alto Hospicio. This is located at the top of the ridge overlooking the city.
Once reaching the edge of the ridge, I was thankful for not being expected to flying from here on the first day, certainly didn't feel ready.



Instead, took photos of the others taking off.
Because the wind strengths and directions follow a daily pattern, this is where all morning flying is done and afternoons, when the wind then blows from the south, are spent at another site called Palo Buque, 17km south of the city. This second site is suitable for complete beginners, which since I had forgotten much of what I learned more than 2 years previously in the UK, is where I felt happier starting.

The first 4 days at Palo Buque were spent practicing ground handling the glider. Because the pilot hangs from the glider like a pendulum in mid air, things are perfectly stable. Before takeoff the ground supports the pilot's weight instead so the glider needs to be balanced, like an upside down pendulum above the pilots head. It always want to fall left or right, backward or forward or a combination of both directions. Once I got the hang of flying this big kite sufficiently well, I was allowed to make gradually longer flights from further and further up the dune until after 4 days of  'playing' in the sand, the instructor, called 'Pato', finally allowed me to launch from Alto Hospicio.

The nervous feeling was no less on arrival at Hospicio for the first 'real' flight, but progress had been made over the last few days and the fact that the instructor thought I was now ready provided some comfort. The take-off was easy, the 1.5 km flight to the landing site was smooth and the landing was soft all with the help of Pato giving instructions over the radio.

The next milestone was soaring on the thermals from Alto Hospicio. It felt fan-bloody-tastic to experience the sensation of being pulled straight upwards in the harness by an invisible elevator of rising air and see the take off site become more distant below. There is also a greater sense of security in rising rather than falling, particularly when getting tossed about by turbulance on entering and leaving thermals.




A thermal is a column of warm air rising over cold. As the air rises, the decreasing pressure causes the air to cool until it becomes colder than the air around it and so spills out away from the column of rising air and falls back to ground. In other words, around every column of rising air exists a curtain of falling air and the stronger the uplift, the greater is the difference in speed between the inner and outer columns and therefore the sharper is the sensation of turbulance felt when entering and leaving the thermal.





         
It was amazing to be flying, under my own control, amongst a swarm of other gliders and birds of prey called Jote(s) [pronounced Hottay(s)] which are a kind of vulture. I really wanted to take pictures of this but in the time that it takes the autofocus on a compact camera to operate, situations can develop very quickly when flying amongst a group of other paragliders. I felt safer keeping my hands on the controls.

After the course finished, there was more time to relax, visit places around Iquique and contemplate where to go next. I had heard of a ghost-town nearby, called Humberstone, which was a nitrate mining town abandonned in 1961 when the need for nitrate suddenly diminished. People had said that it was an eerie place, where it was possible to wander through peoples' houses, the school, the theatre, everywhere. It so happened that I met up with a traveller at the hostal, the day before, whose sole purpose for coming to Iquique was to visit Humberstone. It was certainly interesting an interesting place to visit, but the eeriness that I had heard about was diluted by the presence of 3 other large tours including a school outing.
The town was founded in 1934 and for 27 years was home to around a 1000 habitants including the families of miners who worked in Humberstone and at Santa Lara situated 1 km west. It was a little sad to think of this small proud comunity being dispersed by the need to go elsewhere to suddenly seek more work.The town was officially closed in 1961.














The social life in Iquique was also great and I will really miss the people that I have come to know over the last few weeks.
Back in the saddle again to head towards Bolivia, although I´d much rather fly....