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Browse more guides: India travel | Asia destinations Best Paragliding Destinations Around the World I did my first tandem paraglide in Bir Billing, Himachal Pradesh, in 2017. The pilot - a wiry, calm Tibetan named Pema - strapped me into the harness, told me to run when he said run, and twelve seconds later we were 1,000 feet above the Dhauladhar foothills with my feet dangling above the deodars I'd been hiking among that morning. The sensation isn't what I expected. It isn't terror or even adrenaline particularly. It's a kind of quiet - the absence of engine, the way the wing creates more silence than wind, the slow rotation that lets you see everything below at a pace your brain can actually process. That trip turned into a small obsession. I've now flown tandem in seven countries and watched solo pilots in many more. Paragliding gives you the elevation of helicopters with the silence and slowness that helicopters can't deliver. The destinations on this l...

Browse more guides: India travel | Asia destinations Best Jungle Trekking Destinations Around the World I came back from my first proper jungle trek - five days in Borneo's Danum Valley - with a leech bite scar on my ankle, a respect for tropical humidity that no amount of reading had prepared me for, and the absolute conviction that no other landscape on Earth feels as alive. Mountains feel ancient. Deserts feel patient. The ocean feels indifferent. Jungle feels watchful. Every leaf you brush has something on it. Every sound at night belongs to something. The trees aren't a backdrop; they're a population. That trip launched a six-year jungle-trekking habit that's taken me through Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula, India's Western Ghats, Sumatra's Bukit Lawang, and the Peruvian Amazon. What follows is what I wish someone had told me before that first Borneo trip - which destinations actually deliver, what the trade-offs are, and how to plan a jungle adventure ...