From Sydney to Braidwood

Australia - Posted On

Sébastien writes:

But what the hells are these two doing? Last update of the website is six month old and I only know they are alive just thanks to the grand father uncle of the friend of my aunty who said his neighbour farmer had seen them pedalling on a road in New Caledonia some time ago!

Smart enough, I made this observation to them and now I got the full job of updating the new Facebook page of Fly’n’roll… Should have thought twice. 

Well let’s try for a start. I introduce myself first. Sébastien, friend of Olivier since we used to play in kids garden together, I have shared three weeks on the project in 2009 in Peru. Still wondering why, I committed myself now for six months in Australia. Paragliding pilot, I’m beginner with kites; we’ll see in a few months how this might help through the desert.

First observation, leisure time is much less than what one can expect in such a trip. The sun sets our timetable. Waken up with the first light, riding all day long; enjoying the scenery and the few snakes and kangaroos we pass by, we stop three hours before dusk to set up the camp and cooking. Through all this, there must be kept maximum one hour “free” per day that Olivier and Nadège mostly use for fixing their gear overused by years and (many) kilometres. Very little time can be spared for writing texts, getting pictures ready for the website and updating their medias. And I am not talking yet about the little power we get in the computer battery. 

It’s my turn to tell a bit about the ongoing for the trip. Starting in Sydney where I met them on the 4th October, we went on the coastal road, I was dreaming about desert little tracks, pristine beaches and no one around for kilometres. 

That was the case until a little bit southern of Stanwell Park, which is a renowned paragliding site close by Sydney, ruled by a very strong regulation as many sites are in Ozy (Australia). We had a nice soaring flight there, playing for hours above some hundreds meters of cliffs that went straight to the rough sea below.

Olivier writes here:

I must say one thing for the sake of pilots coming here, on local flying regulation: First, any visiting pilot MUST get an AUSTRALIAN insurance, even though you might have one from your own country covering for Australia (which is our case), and this is VERY EXPENSIVE, because of the little pilot community and the lazy national federation (my point of view). Plus you must apply to this (non-useful for a cent) local federation, a thing that is NOT required in France for visiting Australian pilot when they come. At last, wherever site you want to fly, you must be part of their local club, paying a third time a bill. And they call that “free” flying? We feel this is very much unfair, as when they come to our local site, like St Hilaire for the Coupe Icare, they do not pay a cent for all this. The most despairing thing is the way we found the local “boss” of the site, quite straightforward about this, not listening at all to our point of view, even though we did pay at the end. And this was a little bit similar in New Zealand. Although as visiting pilot, we must accept the rules, we can still have an opinion on this, can’t we?

Sébastien writes again:

Soon enough we understood it wasn’t all the way like that(desert road on pristine beaches) and we made our way through the hills and the bush, Braidwood was our lighthouse for a while. Going through dust road and hills is magnificent of solitude, and we seem to be in the Far West, riding wild horses rather than steel bikes.

That trip sounds pretty good start I must say.