Having arrived in Bir I was very tired having had three hours sleep in Delhi due to a late flight and watch time malfunction the next morning, which was made worse by another day of travel while exhausted. The first few days were certainly impacted by the travel, however they were still good flight days and were critical to learning the ridge for flights later in the week.

I elected to take the internal flight from Delhi to Dharamshala, I am not sure if I would do this again in hindsight as it was much more expensive than a taxi once excess luggage had been paid for, but it did mean I didn’t have a 12 hour taxi ride from Delhi.

After arriving in Bir just after lunch I went and had some wonderful food and explored the village in a slightly delusional state, even managing to find the money exchange where for a small fee I could withdraw cash from my credit card.

Day 1

I was unsure how I was going to sort a taxi on the first morning, so I just assumed that I would walk to the landing site. This was however very easy and as soon as I arrived at the main road in Bir there were multiple people asking me if I wanted a taxi. The taxis are all a fixed price of 700 rupees so there is no need to negotiate, I elected to take this taxi on my own rather than trying to find other people to share it with. The drive up to launch takes a while, but thankfully my driver was not mental and left me feeling fairly save as other taxis were overtaking him.

Launch was not too busy and when I arrived I could already see people climbing away, I quickly setup and launched. My plan was simple, fly in the direction of Dharamshala and then back to Bir. After launching I headed straight to “-0.5” and after plenty of scratching managed to climb out and made my way to the peak behind launch. From here I set off on my XC in the direction of Dharamshala, not that I was expecting to get there on day 1, especially as I was feeling fairly rough.

The air was a bit lumpy, nothing that rough, but combined with not feeling great my stomach was definitely not happy. Despite this I pushed on and was enjoying the flying, getting used to how the thermals were behaving with the inversion layers and the extensive amount of trees, I was definitely glad I had bought a tree kit with me in case of a mishap involving a tree.

Due to my stomach I was sick a few times during the flight and when I got to the first spur of “Pampalur Ridge” I decided that it was time to turn back and save myself for the next day. The flight back was uneventful, but generally lower than my flight out, however with the westerly wind and afternoon thermals it was easy to soar up the trees and over each ridgeline.

As I had plenty of altitude above launch and was feeling a bit better I decided to head east, but once I got to “minus 1” and was struggling to get much altitude I decided that it was time to call it a day and enjoyed the glide back down to landing.

Day 2:

The forecast for day 2 was worse than for day 1 with a persistent and low inversion. After talking to some Scotts on launch I decided to take a different strategy and rather than heading to -0.5, I headed to the house thermal and took the lower route to the west. This initially worked ok, with a decent climb in the house thermal and then on “+1”, unfortunately despite initially climbing away above “Golf Course”, a bad decision meant I then dropped below the inversion and spent ages scratching trying to get high and above it.

Eventually I climbed away and was able to enjoy the rest of the flight, this time heading past Palampur to just short of “Hobbiton”, where I turned back as the clouds looked much lower and my average speed was pretty slow due to my time at Golf Course.

On the way back I was fairly relaxed as it was very easy the day before, but unfortunately with the poorer conditions it was more difficult and I made a poor decision when I got back to Golf Course which meant I dropped below the inversion, and despite nearly making a low save, in the end I did not and ended up landing out.

I had heard that landing out was tricky here as there are so many cables, but what no one had mentioned before is how small all the fields without cables were, as what on first glance looked like large fields were actually small fields with rocky/earthy mounds between. I made a good landing in my targeted field and my fears about how to get back were soon eased as almost immediately a local turned up asking “Taxi?”. So after I packed up my gear, I was soon on the road back to Bir.