Paragliding, canyoning, kayaking, and mountain biking

...these are the things I got up to while in Bovec, Slovenia. It is an outdoor wonderland.

Paragliding was probably the funnest, as it's the closest I've ever come to flying. Basically you run off the side of a mountain while filling up a parachute with air behind you. Then you glide around, catching thermal currents in order to keep yourself airborne. Very neat.

The keyboard I'm using here (in addition to the usual oddities of all the shift keys being different) actually have the z and y key reversed. You'd be surprised how often you use a y.

Canyoning involves hiking up into a mountain, then lowering yourself into a kind of ... well ... canyon. You then walk partway through the river; whenever you come across a waterfall, you either do a waterslide-like action down it, or rappel off the side, then several meters from the water, you just push yourself off the rappel line and zip through the air into the water below. Ample opportunities for cliff jumping as well. Probably the scariest moment was being lowered -through- a waterfall 50 m high.

Kayaking and mountain biking were also fun, but I'd done both of those before, so they're slightly less exciting to talk about.

Prague was nice; more on that later maybe.

Took the most annoying train ride ever this morning. Left at 2 am from Lubjana (definitely spelled that wrong - the capital of Slovenia) to Budapest, where I arrived at noon. Couldn't figure out why they didn't have the option of a sleeper car until a few hours into the trip. From there on in, we were woken up about every 30 minutes to have either our passports or train tickets checked. Very odd for 2 reasons:
1) didn't check the route, but I'm pretty sure we passed through a maximum of 2 countries
2) have had my passport checked once in the 7 countries I have been to so far
3) passport got checked 6 times
...I guess in some countries you get checked not only by immigration then customs, but also by the local police. I was half-expecting to be stopped by the boy scouts to have my passport checked next.

Anyhow, arrived safe and sound in Buda; will probably check out the Pest tomorrow or the next day. In all honesty, I'm somewhat relieved that I'll be in the same place for a little while, and won't have to deal with any more train ladies (more on those later).

cheers