Chocks away Ginger!

My alarm goes off at 05:15, and I swear. How fucking dare they. I quickly remember it's my alarm, and my own fault, and crawl out of bed after a paltry 6 hours of sleep. My ride to my balloon flight is picking me up at 05:45, so I need to hustle.

We head out into the desert for maybe 25km, and pull up outside a couple of Berber style tents. There are multiple balloons going off from the same point, and I'm quickly allocated into a group with 14 others. They are all French. I mistakenly tell our guide that he doesn't need to explain everything twice - that I'll follow in my rusty French ("Ou se trouve la ferme des escargots?") and immediately regret it when I realise that what I thought was a quick chat about the weather was in fact the potentially life-saving instructions for what to do in case of emergency.

It's pretty much pitch black when we arrive, but after a half hour sitting around a fire drinking cups of sweet, mint tea, the first blurred rays of light are starting to creep above the horizon. It's a muddy, brown light, as the clouds have gathered, and visibility is poor. Quickly, the balloons start to inflate - the roar of the hot air burner piercing the still dawn air. Some poor fucker has to stand next to it holding the flaps (technical term) of the balloon open while the burner screams a few feet from his face. We're instructed to board. I do so gracefully, as you would expect.

Once onboard a balloon, there's an amazing moment when you realise that the hot air is now sufficient to lift the basket. It's a strange sensation - like the entire ballon has become weightless. We're only being held down by a few guys who are keeping us where we are so we won't wander off into the path of other balloons before we've got enough lift to go pretty much straight up.

And suddenly - we're off. We head up pretty quickly - faster than I recall from any of my other balloon flights. There's something about the silence of balloon flight which I love. First time out I found it disconcerting, but familiarity breeds anything but contempt in this case.

We head upwards smoothly and at a rate of knots. Before I'm all that aware of it, we're around 1,000 metres up. It's noticeably cooler, and I'm all too conscious of keeping a very firm grip on my phone as I snap pictures. Looking down a LONG way below, I can see some of the other balloons still struggling to get up in the air. And then - all of a sudden, nothing. We're incased in a thick low-lying cloud. It's very surreal.

Our pilot (massively rocking the triple denim) allows our altitude to decrease a little, and we emerge from the cloud. In the couple of minutes we've been hidden from view, something like 20 other balloons have taken to the air. Some are rising quickly, others hovering not far above the arid shrub-land. We play a strange game of yo-yo for the next half hour - variously dropping down quite quickly, and rising back up - to catch particular thermals to take us towards our destination at the foot of the nearby Atlas Mountains foothills.

An hour after taking off, we're coming in to land, and the team do a pretty decent job of it. We hop out, jump in a jeep and head back to the tents for a Berber breakfast. The sun is up and hot now, despite still only being 07:45, and I bathe in the warm rays with a cup of mint tea...Read more