Complaining Flyboy
Trip Start
May 21, 2007
1
29
44
Trip End
Mar 30, 2008
Cordoba,
Argentina
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Well, it was crap.
How can guidebooks get things so wrong? Here's the Rich&Sin skinny on Cordoba.
- There are a few nice old buildings. A few. Three? Maybe four tops. The rest are shit. Dirty and shitty.
- There are 7 universities in town and that means a lot of drunk teenagers singing at 6am on every street and under every window.
- All of the cars are missing their exhausts. It's the only explanation I can think of for the noise of the traffic - it is ear bleedingly loud. I see a gap in the market for Mr. Fast Fit to exploit...
- Their siesta is the longest I have witnessed in any city anywhere on the planet. Shops open for 15 minutes in the morning and then a half and hour in the evening. If that.
- Smokers of the world unite! Lets all smoke two cigarettes at a time! Lets never open a window or door (lest, heaven forbid, the area gets VENTILATED)!!
- Internet Cafes have to use keyboards made in 1982. No letters printed on the keys and extra sticky spacebars. Shit.
- One of their main tourist attractions is a 'river' called La Canada. It is not a river. It is a drain. CAN YOU HEAR ME LONELY PLANET - A BIG DRAIN. NOT A RIVER.
- They do in their defence have the country's largest all you can eat restaurant. Do you think I'd pass a cultural landmark such as that by? Not on your nelly. 6 yoyos for all the steak and seafood you can manage...let's just say I needed a LOT of fibre in my diet for a few days afterwards.
It took us two days to get out of this hell hole and scramble into the country a little north to spend some time in La Cumbre, a sleepy little town famous for its alfajores (pronounced ALPHA WHORES, which I quite liked saying as often as the situation allowed) and for being the Argie paragliding capital. It's a small spot, and we were there in the off season, so everything was even quieter than normal, but it was a nice relaxed setting to take in a few walks and throw ourselves off a hillside.
We decided to go for a tandem paraglide with Pablo, one of the many instructors plying their trade in the town, based mostly on his hair. It seems arbitrary, but we figured it might be only a slightly less useless measure of a man than his guidebook review. So long haired Pablo it was. He and his mate picked Marge and I up from the town and drove us out to the launch site (luckily, his pal had good hair too, and we took this as a good sign). Once there, we laid out the chutes and strapped ourselves into the tandem harness and before you could say 'gravity is my friend', Marge was running towards the edge with a paraglider inflating behind her. With a gust, she was gone - soaring up and up overhead with her screaming laughter echoing around the hills. Then it was my turn and we ran down the slope until suddenly I was running in mid-air and we were flying....
And it was....peaceful. Not adrenalin rushing, not a 'pump your fists in the air' moment, just extremely serene. It really is the closest you can imagine to actually flying like a bird, and as we edged from thermal to thermal and floated down into the valley, it was like being weightless. It wasn't overwhelming like sky-diving or bungy-jumping are supposed to be, it just felt very natural and relaxed. Slowly, we started coming in to land near the Rio Plata river and gently touched down on our feet.
It was only then that I realised Marge was still way up in the air. 10 minutes later, she floated down beside us - still laughing. Pablo explained that they'd been lucky with the thermals and caught a great one that kept them hanging in the air for ages.
Yeah right. I knew I had the all-you-can-eat buffet in Cordoba to blame. I should have stopped at thirds, and the second desert was probably unnecessary.
Thermals my arse.
