Not long after this happened, I was in China and met up with a local glider pilot to check into the possibility of doing some flying in that country. It didn't work out (soaring is not exactly common or easy there) but we had an interesting talk. Turned out he did paragliding too and was friends with the Chinese fellow who got killed in that cloud in Australia.

This is yet another reason I won't try paragliding. I don't want to fly anything where my body forms the landing gear, nor anything whose terminal velocity is lower than the speed of updrafts in a thunderstorm.