Bir Billing
"The fourteen minutes I spent not entirely convinced I would survive, and did not want to end."
India's paragliding capital, where a Tibetan refugee settlement sits below a launch site delivering some of the best cross-country flying on earth.
Bir sits in the lower Kangra valley of Himachal Pradesh, a small town best known to most Indians for two unrelated things that happen to share a zip code: a Tibetan refugee settlement, established in the 1960s and now home to monasteries, a Buddhist university, and prayer flags strung across nearly every rooftop, and a paragliding scene considered the best in India, ranked among the finest cross-country flying sites in the world. I came for the second thing and left thinking more about the first. Walking through the settlement in the morning, monks in maroon robes moved between the Chokling and Palpung Sherabling monasteries, and a young monk I fell into conversation with, over milk tea at a stall run by his uncle, told me his parents had made the crossing from Tibet on foot decades before he was born, and that Bir was simply the only home he’d ever known.
Fourteen minutes over the Kangra valley
The launch site, Billing, sits about 14 kilometres up a switchbacking road from Bir at roughly 2,400 metres, and from up there the entire Kangra valley opens out below — terraced fields, the town of Bir itself reduced to a scatter of rooftops, and the jagged wall of the Dhauladhar range rising immediately behind the launch point like a backdrop nobody would believe if it were painted. My pilot, a local named Rakesh who’d been flying this ridge for over a decade, gave me approximately ninety seconds of instruction — “run when I say run, stop when I say stop” — before we were airborne, and any nervousness I had evaporated somewhere around the second thermal, when the valley tilted and the wind carried us in a slow spiral high enough that the fields below looked like a quilt.
Bir hosted the Paragliding World Cup in 2015, and the site’s reputation among pilots rests on reliable thermals and a long flying season, drawing cross-country pilots from Europe who base themselves here for weeks at a time, easily identifiable in town by their sun-weathered faces and the parachute-shaped bags slung over their shoulders at every café. I landed in a field outside town, legs unsteady, grinning in a way I hadn’t since I was probably ten years old, and Rakesh just nodded and started folding the canopy, clearly having seen that exact reaction on every single client he’s ever flown.
When to go: October to November and March to May are the prime paragliding seasons, with the World Cup-caliber autumn thermals considered the best of the year by local pilots.