After being a tourist in Guatamala for a while and learning Spanish (trying to :-) in Antigua, I went to visit some hangglider pilots in Guatamala city. On Friday morning at 4 am I met Lenin Conde in my hotel and we went to get our gliders at Mario Tobar's place. Then we headed for the road and met some other pilots later on the way to Honduras. To get across the border is a intresting event, 20 people waiting 1,5 ours to get a simple stamp in their passport and you have to pay 3 dollars for it if you are a foreigner. Around 2 pm we arrive San Pedro sula and we went to our hotel and later we prepared the landing field. The "competition" was more of the friendly type, a spotlanding competition. We used sawmill leftovers to create the spot and choped down some trees with the machetes to make space to enter the paddock. After that we went drinking and checked out the local nightlife in San Pedro Sula. We ended up in a place called Mantra and for around 10 $ you had free bar all nigth. Then came Saterday and after breakfast around 11 we went up the hill to fly. Mario Palacios (
http://www.hanggliding-guatemala.de/) lended me a Seedwings Viagro 14 full matrix sail and I used some time to inspect the glider before i flew it, better safe than sorry! a very quick ving and almost unstable with full VG, but that is proberly becourse of the settings of the sprogs on this glider and that I felt i was to heavy for it. Otherwise a OK glider easy to land and start (10 cm of VG needed to get it stable). That day we where 12 hangglider pilots and 4 paragliders pilots.
Flying in was nice in Honduras, quite surprisingly the big clouds above (seems like nimbus) dident lift much at all. there was no problem flying up and in then get out again of the clouds.
Both days I flew there it was really the same way, very hot around 39 Celsius and humidity around 1oo prosent, it sure felt like that anyway :-) The launch was intresting and being in the tropics is nice since you can pick mangos in the nearby trees! Landing was relly crowded with people when you landed and tonns of kids come running towards you to help, when you had landed
.
Not many tourist flying in Honduras I was told, I was the first European Hangglider pilot to fly there. There were also some Paraglider pilots from Columbia, Costa Rica and one of the pilots from Colombia was from Germany(living with a Colombian pilot). In Honduras there is not many pilots at the moment only ONE hangglider pilots.
Other intresting event in the aera was a aeroshow close by, so now and then there were some fighterjets flying by.
Picture1: Selfportrait over San Pedro Sula.
Picture2: One of the guatamalian pilots, while i trying to get a close up foto :-)
More pictures from San Pedro Sula Honduras:
http://foto.vg.no/show_album.php?aid=756829
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