Hot Air Ballon Ride over Luxor

We began our first and once-in-a- lifetime ballooning experience with an early morning pickup from our hotel in Luxor at around 5:00 a.m. We were taken to the ferry docks and went by boat across the Nile River to the West Bank. Surprisingly, there were hundreds of people on the other side being organized into vans to go to the Air Force base where the flights take off from.

A guide briefed us on safety measures and answered questions that people had. Trucks arrived with the balloons and we watched as the inflation process began. This is when we started to get excited!

There had to be around 30 balloons with baskets that held around 20 people. Watching and listening to the balloons as they began to fill up (come to life) was awesome. We boarded with the assistance of the ground crew, met the captain and felt the heat from the big fire. The take off was so gentle that we hardly realized that we had left the ground. In fact, there wasn’t even a sense of motion as we floated upward with 19 other balloons.

Being in the air, gave us a wonderful feeling of peace and tranquility, disturbed only by the noise of the balloon burners. Our flight lasted about an 1 hour from take-off to landing and we reached the maximum height of 500 m. The views of the sunrise and Luxor and all its ancient temples and tombs was breathtaking.

We glided over farmers’ green fields of sugar cane and bananas and saw the canals used for irrigation. The pilot could rotate the balloon to give us 360 degree views, could go up and down but didn’t have control of the direction we were going in.

On one side of us was the Nile and it’s famous fertile land and on the other side we could see the desert and mountains containing the Ramses’ tombs and the Valley of the Kings and Queens.

Before landing, we were reminded of the proper landing position, crouched low in the basket with our backs facing the direction we were going in. Our pilot looked for a smooth spot to land in the desert and we bumped to a stop as the ground crew jumped on the basket and hung onto the sides of the basket to keep us from tipping over. Quickly, they dealt with taking the air out of the ballon as we provided the weight to keep the balloon down.

What an incredible experience for all of us Phileas Fogg wannabes!Read more