TRAVEL THE WORLD

SECRET SPOT Surfing for sites on Google Earth

Photo: John Stapels

TRAVEL THE WORLD

Welcome to the 2020 edition of the Cross Country Travel Guide – our annual guided tour of some of the world’s best flying spots.

It will not have escaped your notice that travel and how we do it has become a hot issue. The environmental and social challenges travel, and air travel in particular, present are not new, but they have moved up the agenda quickly this past year. You can’t hop on a plane from Europe to Colombia in 2020 without either feeling a little bit guilty, or annoyed that someone somewhere is trying to make you feel a little bit guilty, about your carbon footprint. In Sweden they even have a name for it: Flygskam, flight shame.

As pilots we are of course not immune to any of it, even though we like to think we tread lightly and leave no trace. That may be true in some of the still-wilder parts of the world, but it’s not true for many of the world’s more popular sites. We’re not skiing, with its mountaintop restaurants and massive infrastructure, but we’re not blameless either.

What to do about it? We are after all already in the wash cycle asking for the soap to be changed. My guess is that we will all make our own personal decisions on how to travel lighter: to take the train instead of fly; to enter the comps nearby rather than on the other side of the world; to limit the number of trips we take in a year, or to extend the one we do take. Whatever we do, it is a challenge we will be dealing with for years, wherever we are from.

The joy is that there is a world of flying still to discover, no matter how we get there, or even if it takes us a little longer. The beautiful thing about free flight is that our real destination is the sky: every day is different, even if we fly from the same site 365 days a year. We don’t have to travel half way around the world to have an amazing experience; we simply need to take off.

In this edition of the Cross Country Travel Guide you’ll find three sections. First comes Travel IQ, which looks at subjects like the alreadymentioned hot potato of responsible travel, how to choose a paragliding guide and how to vol-biv. Then we have the Destinations section, where we focus on getting to know some truly amazing sites. Where we could, we asked locals or near-locals to tell us all about them and what makes them special. Finally we have the What’s On section, your guide to the year’s most important competitions and biggest festivals or fly-ins.

No matter where you go or how you get there this year, I hope you have an amazing time. One of the beauties of our sport is how it opens our eyes to what a jewel we live on, and how precious it is. Flying teaches you that, and travel can too. Bon vol!

Ed Ewing Editor