27 JULY 2013 – UNEXPECTED VISITOR
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No it’s paraglider! WHAT?
The Konya Plain offers many interesting sights: the ocean of sunflowers, the daily train of cows back and forth to pasture, the quiet nights of shooting stars. What we did not expect to see was a low flying paraglider. Needless to say, a young man carry 25kg of paragliding equipment walking up our driveway in the middle of the night is by far one of the most interesting sites we have yet to witness!
Allow me to introduce to you Basat Okay – a native of Istanbul, and Systems Development Supervisor at Volkswagen Doğuş Tüketici Finansmanı A.Ş by day. In the summer of 2002, after a conversation with his father, he took up paragliding as a sport. Yesterday he attempted to break the Turkish paragliding record. He flew for 6 and a half hours from Ankara cross country finally landing just 3km east of Boncuklu and Hayiroğlu. He flew a distance of 258.3km, just 0.6km shy of the current Turkish record, though this accomplishment is no less impressive. We welcomed him with open, if puzzled arms and he spent the night at our Site Guard Mustafa’s house.
We had a few moments to have quick chat this evening to find out a little more about his epic adventure before he headed into Konya and home to Istanbul. Quite a remarkable start to the working week.
If you would like to know more about Basat,
- Follow him on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/BasatOkay
- Follow him on twitter https://twitter.com/Basat
- Find out more about is club at http://www.albatros.org.tr/
- News and more about the sport at http://www.niviuk.com/
Paraglider Basat Okay drops in for chat.
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