Ross Golder’s Blog

(reposted from a mailing list mail, as I haven’t got the list archive on-line anywhere yet…)

On Saturday (6th December 2008), I managed to achieve an ambition I’ve had for quite a while now – to hang-glide in Thailand. A couple of weeks ago, I was scanning the web board of the Thailand Gliding Club and saw some paragliders announcing that they were planning to fly at Khao Pang near Chumpon on 5th to 7th December. I was surprised, as I’d previously tried to drive up that hill and the road had been washed away. Also, some local monks had told when we were there before that nobody had flown there for a few years, so I’d assumed the site had become disused. However, on contacting the group, it appears that the road had been made accessible and they were indeed planning to fly that weekend.

So, on the Friday, Chai and I loaded up the hang-glider and headed out on the hour-and-a-half journey south. Unfortunately, within about 20km of the hill, the truck seemed to slip out of gear into neutral and wouldn’t go back into gear, so we had to pull over. Luckily, there was a garage only a few hundred yards up the road, and they towed it in and examined it. It turned out that the transmission part of the gearbox was dry as a bone, and that the teeth on two of the cogs had ground off completely. It probably had been that way since the Mitsubishi garage did some work on it a few weeks prior! So, we spent all day Friday at some garage arranging a new gearbox and waiting for the mechanics to fit it etc. Eventually, we rolled out of the garage at 9pm, and went and found a cheap hotel in Chumpon.

Saturday morning, we checked out and headed to the hill. A couple of locals pointed us to the landing field, where we found Tim, the owner of the landing field. It turns out he bought the land, had a part of it which had been excavated filled in and flattened and turned it into a paraglider landing field, with a small training hill at the back. A very nice job too. He was shocked to see a hang-glider, as he said there was only about four other people he knew of that either flew them or had them in Thailand. Unfortunately, we were both a little unsure if there was enough run-off to get a hang-glider in, as he sometimes has to use the full length of it to land his paraglider. Except for this field the rest of the area around the bottom of the hill is palm and rubber trees, with a few rice paddies which still quite wet – nowhere else really to land. Anyway, I figured that, given the wind speed and direction, it would be good for making as short a landing as possible along the longest part of the field. The worse case scenario would be that I’d risk a light brush with the palm trees at the end of the landing strip if it wasn’t long enough!

So, we went up to examine take-off. The track up the hill requires a fairly sturdy 4×4 with some good ground clearance, as it’s very rocky in places. I found that low-ratio 4WD was required, especially on the hairpin bends. Take-off was a slightly sloped grass edge, with rockier ground towards the front, fairly good clearance of the trees below, but some power lines coming up the dirt track to the right which suggested I needed to get well clear of the hill before turning after take-off. The wind was coming slightly to the left of take-off anyway, so I’d be turning left into wind as soon as I was away anyway. It was a north-easterly, mostly around 15km/h, gusting to 25km/h from time to time. Tim mentioned that he didn’t think that anyone had every flown a hang-glider on this hill before, which didn’t help my nerves as I was getting myself together and figuring out ‘what could go wrong?!’. Take-off and soaring wouldn’t be a problem, but I was still considering the adjustments I could make to my landing technique to get safely into the fairly tight landing field. I had an idea, but I figured I’d go over it again during a few passes over the field as I was preparing to land.

A good, slow rig of the glider and pre-flight check later I was good to go. Tim was noseman, while Chai did camera duties. When I was ready, the wings level and the upcoming wind looking steady, I started bringing on speed and running as fast as I could, but I let the nose glide up a touch, so it mushed a bit and dived, but I got away cleanly, and once clear got tucked in and turned left along the ridge. Needless to say, I had a fantastic hour or so soaring up and down in fairly good conditions – not too bumpy a ride given it was nearly mid-day. The view was pretty awesome, including features such as the television transmitting station and it’s huge antenna on top of the ridge, behind you, a river stretching off to the north-east to the horizon, a variety of smaller mountains dotted along the horizon, a beautifully neat patchwork of tree plantations directly beneath you, the main Bangkok-to-the-south road (Petchagasem Rd) running along behind the ridge, with a sprinkling of petrol stations and other buildings dotted along it, and a few articulated trucks moving along it. I was listening to activity on the CB radio that I was using to keep in touch with Chai on the ground – it seems some people on the ground had overheard us on the radio and were trying to contact me in the air. I didn’t have time to strike up a conversation, and carried on flying and further up and down the ridge in each direction, working the hot-spots to get a fairly measly 700ft above launch, but it was reliable. The rare thermals were weak and seemed to be getting blown out pretty quickly, so other than the odd 360 here and there, it was largely about exploring the ridge and it’s features during a north-easterly, doing a few out-and-backs within sight of the landing area.

Anyway, I had my fun and saw Chai and Tim arriving at the landing field, so headed down. The landing field is almost directly at the foot of the hill, and the land around it still produces a fair amount of lift, so descent was slow and a did a few circuits of the field coming down. I came down over the last trees downwind of landing as low and slow as possible without stalling, then dived in to get some extra speed through the ground effect. In the excitement I pulled on a little bit more speed than I wanted and on levelling out near the ground, I popped back up again, which lost me a few appearance points and caused me to veer slightly left, shorting my run-off a little. My feet found contact with the ground and I straightened up my legs, dug my new pair of trainers (3quid from the local market) into the grass below, and put the anchors down for a safe and sound, if not very visually impressive landing about 20m from the line of palm trees marking the end of the runway!

The wind died off shortly after that. Tim flew down on his paraglider later in the afternoon, but the others that had arranged to come via the website didn’t turn up on Saturday or Sunday, as the weather on Friday (while we were stuck in the garage) was a little strong for them (probably perfect for me!) and it looked to be the same on Saturday and Sunday. I saw them drive into the landing field from the air, and Chai apparently met them briefly, but they’d disappeared by the time I landed. However, it looks like there’s another get together up on a hill somewhere near Udon Thani next weekend, so I’m currently making plans to go there and then on to Mee’s parents the following week, then stop by at another hill near Nakhon Ratchasima if possible the weekend after on the way back. Apparently, there are only about five flyable months in the year here, so I guess I’d better make the most of it!

Some pictures and video clips (inc take-off and landing) here:

http://www.chilternflyers.org/pictures/main.php?g2_itemId=361266

–
Ross

Today, from 10am to 8pm (10hrs), I drove this…

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&saddr=Nong+Ki,+Nong+Ki,+Buri+Ram,+Thailand&daddr=Unknown+road&hl=en&geocode=%3BFUWurAAd4tvuBQ&mra=ls&sll=11.328832,99.535789&sspn=0.052262,0.090036&ie=UTF8&t=h&z=7

I’ve done the full Khemmerat (Mee’s parents) to Ban Krut before in one journey - that was an 11am to 1am trip (14hrs). I collapsed after that one :) I don’t feel too bad after this one, though.

I hate it when it turns out that it was my fault all along!

The telephone engineers came, fixed the dead phone line, claiming ‘a squirrel had eaten through the plastic flex on the line and water had got onto the copper inside’ or some other bull**** excuse. I said I was glad that the phone line was working but asked why was the ADSL router still not syncing. He called through and had the port reset, and shortly after the ADSL synced up. As he was on his way out the door, I asked if I was likely to get the usual ‘evening time’ problem and he gave me another bull*** excuse about an ant’s nest that had formed around some cables at the exchange and that it should have been fixed. I waited until dark and sure enough, the line went down at around 18:15. I was all ready to call 1177 and bitch that it was still a problem again, but I decided to wait until the morning when I could call the local office directly.

The next day, P’Bot brought his computer round to download the latest MIDI tunes for his karaoke rig and had a little trouble getting his computer and the screen to power up. It turns out he’d plugged them into the upper two ports of the power supply. In the bottom (third) outlet, was the extension cord that goes to the router. After a confusing few minutes, we realised that even though there is what appears to be a power light lit up on the UPS, no power was getting to the top two ports. We pressed the power button on the front, expecting the router to go off. Instead, the computer and monitor come on. It turns out the bottom outlet on the UPS isn’t power-regulated (only ’surge protected’) and is more-or-less a pass through directly from the mains. As such, it is susceptible to the same power dips that the rest of the house suffers from in the early evening.

So, I reconnected the router to one of the regulated power sockets and waited for dark. It’s now well after 7pm. On an ordinary evening, I would have been off-line for between 30 and 45 mins already and struggling with GPRS. Not tonight, it seems to be holding a steady connection (and has since I switched the power point, 9 hours ago!). And now, touch wood, I’m feeling very relieved that for the first time since I care to remember, I might actually have uninterrupted internet connectivity at the time of the day I most need/want it - in the middle of the UK working day! The root cause, it seems, was because I didn’t RTFM the UPS manual (the symbols/wording on the back of the unit aren’t too clear to be fair!), and because I didn’t test or question my assumption that the power to the router was actually being regulated properly. Unfortunately, the PC that the UPS was going to power hasn’t been working so it wasn’t there as an indicator of the state of the top two ports and the light on the front of the UPS led me to think the unit was on.

Lesson learned, once again, the hard way, about assumptions.

Would you Adam’n'Eve it? The ADSL went down (as it usually does) yesterday evening, but it didn’t come back up as usual again later. I woke up in the middle of the night and the ’sync’ light, which is usually a comforting green, was a nasty, bad-news flashing orange. I lifted the handset - no dialtone. Cut off again. WTF!

It seems to have been raining here most of the night. I really hope that rain isn’t the cause of this. This is the third week in a month now I’ve had ADSL/phone line problems going into the start of a work week. Luckily GPRS is behaving itself atm.

UPDATE: Got voice back, but with a heavy crackle on the line. ADSL still unable to sync.

How it is when you’ve got a stinking, stinking cold, can’t stop sneezing, coughing, blowing my nose, sweating/shivering, mild headache/dizziness (but can still use the computer, just about), can’t get a bloody ADSL connection, GPRS stays up for less than a minute at a time before having to reboot your phone to unlock it’s Bluetooth for whatever reason, and you’ve got two colleagues trying to work with you over Skype/IM and would like you to connect to their various servers and find/fix problems etc. What do you do?

Unfortunately, the only thing I can think of right now is to take some cold/flu tablets, go have a lie down and come back to it all later or even tomorrow.