Sister!

Angel has finally made it (I´ve only been (anxiously) waiting for oh, a month and a half), and we decided to waste no time. I picked her up at the airport late Sunday night, and after a restful nights sleep, we headed out the following morning for a little paragliding. There is no way to see a city like flying 1000m above it. A bus took us up, up WAY up the mountainsides that surround Medellin to an altitude of 2600m (Medellin sits around 1400m). Paragliding is kind of like hang gliding, except it is a parachute/kite instead of a hard thing. The staging area was a semi flat grassy bit with a steep drop off down the mountain. I was up first. I strapped into the harness, which included a seat for the tandem rider, and they threw the schute in the air. CORRE!! CORRE!! CORRE!! Before I knew what was happening we were running at the edge (awkwardly, picture a potato sack race crossed with a three legged race) and then the edge dropped away and we were flying! Woohoo!! Didn´t take long before we were doing some aerobatics (swoops, dives, spins) with the cows and farms looking pretty teeny below us. After a 30 or so minute flight, my landing was an ungraceful plop onto my bum back at the staging area.

The following day we set about doing some proper sight seeing. Plazas, churches, cable cars, statues of fat people...Things Medellin is known for. A whirlwind two day tour of the big city and we headed up to the coast. We´re currently in my old ´hood of Taganga, setting out on the 5 day trek through the Jungle to Ciudad Perdida tomorrow morning. We really are wasting no time on this trip. Quite a change from my past month of doing...oh, nothing. A very welcome change, don´t get me wrong. Excited to have had a little time to travel with both my sisters :-).