Up In The Air

I'd never flown in a hot air balloon before. Somehow it seemed like the natural spot to try this for the first time was in a place where we'd be landing somewhere on a vast plain of grass which might be visited that day (or even at the very moment we touched down) by wild animals like lions, hyena and leopards. Hey, there's a first time for everything. Sure! Why not?

Most everything about our trip to Kenya and Tanzania was planned in advance with very little ability to do something different from what was scripted. We had a free day on the front end of the trip in Nairobi and a similarly free day on the last day in Arusha. In between, we traveled as a group pretty much everywhere with all five (in Kenya) or six (in Tanzania) of us doing the exact same thing at the exact same time.

But there were a couple of opportunities to engage in optional activities. Two of the three or four options involved flying in a hot air balloon above the savannah either at Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya or Serengeti National Park in Tanzania or both. We figured this was something we just couldn't pass up. We also figured once would be enough (these things are expensive) so we signed up for the cheaper of the two at Masai Mara. Exciting stuff!

So about that heights thing. I'm not particularly crazy about them. In fact, I might not like them much at all.

Firing up the engine!

At about 6 a.m. when it's pretty much pitch black and you can't see what's lurking in the grass (are there snakes out there?) and there are hippo noises coming from the trees about 30 feet from you, comfort at heights is really one of the furthest things from your mind. If it weren't for the eight or ten guys directing a giant flame into an enormous oh so flimsy looking balloon to get it to inflate that is. Will this thing really stay up there and not catch fire?

The flame was hot by the way. Like really hot. Despite the heat, I inched (or maybe footed or yarded) a bit closer to the balloon after hearing the hippo. Putting a few more feet (and maybe even a person or two) between me and a hippo is worth getting a little bit of a burn. In the end, nobody got charged by a hippo or burned but I still don't like those hippo grunts.

By the way, can you see the basket in the picture above? It's actually a basket. Like made of wicker. I'm going up in the air in that thing? Like 1,000 feet above the surface of the Earth? I'm sure it's safe, right? These people are professionals, right?

I eventually stopped being a baby and climbed in. If you look carefully in the photo above, you can see there are already some people in the basket. They had to get in there on their backs while the thing was on its side and then get tipped rudely into their current place. It did not look comfortable. At least I didn't have to do that.

Aloft with Captain Barnabas.

I think it's important when we travel that we try to see the places we go from as many perspectives as possible. In some cases, this means talking to people who live and work where we are visiting to understand their perspective on life or deliberately visiting somewhere non-touristy. Other times, it literally means seeing where we are from a different angle for ourselves. I wanted to take this balloon ride because I wanted to see the grassland that we spent a couple of days each in Kenya and Tanzania not from ground level but from above and see if it looked any different or if my perception of where I was changed. Sometimes when I travel I can get this different perspective by climbing up or taking an elevator up to the top of a tall building. Can't really do that in Masai Mara National Reserve so we were left with climbing an acacia tree or trusting a wicker basket with a dozen or so other people suspended below a giant ball of gas. Acacia trees have too many thorns and then there's that whole you might meet a leopard up there. Balloon is safer.

Once the thing is inflated and you've been tipped into place or have climbed aboard, you are ready to take off just about as soon as it gets light and before the wind dies down. And yes, we are wind dependent for propulsion. Our captain, Barnabas, claimed he could spin the balloon round in mid-air to get the different sides of the basket views of whatever we would see that was amazing but we had no jet thrusters or anything like that. We'd have to go where the wind took us.

The plan (and I assume these people that run this gig know that the plan will always work) was for the wind to take us from our spot near our camp out over and into the Reserve so we could get a quality look at the landscape and maybe an animal or two or a hundred. We'd land after about an hour (which seems like a really short time) and be picked up wherever we happened to touch down. Seriously? Yep. We were trailed loosely speaking by a truck (for the balloon) and a bus (for us occupants of the balloon's basket). Of course, the balloon flies where the wind lets it go; the truck and bus have to stick to the roads. Hopefully they can keep up.

The view from the balloon. I like this one because of the heron flying above the water.

I think what I expected from this ride was that we would get some amazing looks at enormous herds of prey animals grazing and moving over the Earth. I found out pretty quickly there were two problems with this expectation. First, it's not the Great Migration in Masai Mara yet. That event, when there are huge herds of zebra and wildebeest moving, occurs in July and August. Sure, we saw a group of maybe 100 or so African buffalo but most of the groups of animals were in the twos and threes or maybe 10 to 15 tops. And most were standing still.

Second, we didn't necessarily fly right over the animals. Remember we are a little bit at the mercy of the wind. We can't just hang a left or right and zoom down to get a close look at a group of impala or a lone bull elephant. We were able to descend and ascend and did this throughout the ride, getting us a closer and more inclusive look at what was below. But buzz a group of topi or giraffe? No sir! I think the best looks at the animals that I thought I would get are below, a group of three topi (I guess the balloon made one skittish and he took off faster than my camera could capture) and a partial look at a harem herd of impala. Don't get me wrong. I appreciate the chance to see and capture these creatures from a different angle; I just didn't set expectations very well for myself on the animal front here.

Three topi directly below...

and a few female impala grazing in the breaking morning light.

What I did get out of seeing Masai Mara from above was just how vast the landscape is. It seemed to go on forever and ever. I know the park is pretty big at 580 square miles but it seemed like I couldn't see anything close to the end of it. There was grass everywhere just punctuated every so often by a single tree. Except where there was water.

Seeing the surface of the ground from above really emphasized for me how precious the few spots of water were. The only place where it occurred (and animals like hippos were singularly constrained to these spots) were these tiny (relatively speaking) gashes in the landscapes surrounded by life. There were more trees, thicker grass and hippos and birds packed into these tiny areas than any other place we could see. I'm not sure if some of these things form a river or a connected group of watering holes during the rainy season but seeing them just every so often really emphasized what a precious resource water would be in place like this. I'm not sure how I could appreciate these oases in quite the same way if I weren't flying above them.

The precious water in an open gash in the grassland.

Now...about that fear of heights. I have to say it was amazingly nonexistent. The wicker basket that I imagined was flimsy was surprisingly solid and the fact that it came up to mid-chest level made it seem like there was really no way we could fall out. I suppose there really was no way we could fall out unless we started climbing on top of the basket somehow and who's going to do that? We for sure were high above the ground below but the ride was so gentle and soft and the rise and fall was so slow that it was almost like we ourselves were floating on the air. I've never been so high above the ground and felt so secure. It was kind of weird. Everything about the ride was so smooth from the very moment we drifted gently off the land to right before the instant we touched down.

I wrote that last sentence deliberately. Everything until right before we landed was soft. The touching down, though, that was kind of tough. Our departure up, up and away felt like we were being transported away on some pillowy cloud. I expected the touchdown might be equally comfortable. And I have no idea why.

Imagine you are being carried by the wind rapidly and just above the surface of the earth in what (again) is a surprisingly solid and rough basket and you are going to crash. That's us right before we touched down. We are sitting down on the (thankfully padded) benches in our craft and holding on to the straps on the opposite wall for dear life. We can't see anything other than the weaving of the basket about 24 inches from our face because sitting down (as shown in the second picture of this post) our heads are below the top of the basket.

To understand when we might hit (and it seems at this point we are moving very fast) we have to listen to the instruction of our captain, Barnabas, who does a remarkable job of informing us, thankfully. When we finally hit / crashed into the very firm Earth, it wasn't that bad and I expressed as much. Barnabas let me know we weren't down yet. In other words we bounced. Then we bounced again. And maybe again a couple of other times, finally dragging to a halt and slowly at first, then pretty rapidly, we tipped over and slammed on our backs finally on solid ground.

The view to my right after our crash landing. Hoping there are no lions nearby.

So there we were on our backs looking up at the tallest of the grasses around us in the Masai Mara National Reserve. The bus to get us out of there was, of course, nowhere to be seen because it wasn't flying and hadn't managed to make the kind of time the balloon made. So we were left for 20 minutes or so standing on some of the most gorgeous landscape on the face of the Earth in the same Reserve with lions, cheetah, hyena, leopards and African buffalo. How cool is that?

On our last trip to Africa, we'd never intentionally left our vehicle (be it a boat or car) when inside a park. True, we had to get out and push our truck once when it wouldn't start (not kidding!) but given our druthers we wouldn't have broken down in the first place. Now we were standing where the previous night or week or month elephants might have trodden or lions might have dragged down a kill or a family of mongoose may have passed by. It was so incredibly peaceful. But I was ultimately glad the bus was on its way. As romantic as the idea of being alone (well with 12 or so others) in the middle of the African landscape was, I'm glad we had a rescue vehicle coming. We kept an eye on some African buffalo that were comically far away. We kept an eye out anyway.

I'm not sure when (or even if) I'm taking my next balloon ride. If I only do it once in my life, I can't think of a cooler place to do it. It might not have met all of my inflated expectations but it did what it was supposed to do: get me a different way of looking at where I was. That one hour floating above the ground for sure got me an increased appreciation of a place I knew I already loved.

I'm also glad we didn't land in the middle of a pride of hungry lions. That never happens, right?

Spotted from the basket. Good thing she wasn't around when we landed