Hot air balloons: Soaring over the world

Floating in a hot air balloon is an incredible experience that is available all over the world.  Some  particularly beautiful locations for hot-air ballooning are

• Cappadocia, Turkey – shown below
• The Serengeti, Africa – shown below
• Luxor, Egypt – shown below
• Napa Valley, California
• Tuscany, Italy
• Loire Valley, France
• Sedona, Arizona
• Albuquerque, New Mexico (especially for the Balloon festival)

I did this experience in Turkey. Soaring over Cappadocia (Kappa-dokey-uh) in a hot air balloon is a very memorable experience.

To do it, you get up extremely early in the morning, so early that many people in my tour group just stayed up so that they wouldn’t chance missing it.

You are driven out to the location where the balloons take off and they start unrolling and inflating them while you stand there in the cold and dark night air. It takes some time before the air in the balloon is hot enough that the balloon even lifts off the ground at all.

We were treated to hot tea in preflavored cups that you only had to add hot water to. So above are shown apple tea, lemon tea, and berry tea cups. I’d never seen that before, and I had the traditional apple tea. You can get apple tea in the US too, like this:


So tasty and reminds me of Turkey. And no caffeine.

Finally, the balloon will rise, but the balloon will be standing vertically for a fair amount of time before it is ready to take off laden with people. So you will have to wait patiently for the pilots to indicate you can get on. They will likely specify where you stand to balance the basket.

Once you get on, they’ll wait until it is ready to take off with all the added weight, and then they’ll remove the weights holding it down and you’ll go up in the sky as if you were on a cherry picker, but then you’ll go higher, and your brain will register that there is nothing attached to you and you just have to trust the pilot.

With luck, you get up before the sun is over the horizon and get to see the sunrise with the light making extremely long shadows from the shapes carved in stone. You’ll be in a large area with dozens of other balloons, which you can often get great pictures of with great rock formation backgrounds.

You drift along with occasional bursts of fire keeping you from slowly falling. It’s serene and cold.

Long before you are ready, the ride is done and you land on the ground and wait to be returned to your hotel. Often you help deflate the balloons by walking on them and pushing them down so that the workers can roll them up again and load them onto a truck to start again bright and early the next morning.

Pro-tip: If you do this, it is very cold in the morning, and quite cold when you are up in the balloon so be sure to bring layers and gloves/mittens/hat.

When I got back I ordered apple tea so I could remember this experience.

Here’s some pics from my balloon ride over the Serengeti.

And from my balloon ride in Egypt at Luxor