lethargic_man | Up, up and away!

The other week,

aviva_m and I took to the sky in a Gigantic Donkey!

No, we haven't joined Pink Floyd or anything. Some of you may remember three years ago I had the idea of going hot-air ballooning. I wanted to do it then, but couldn't find anyone to do it with, and the idea lay on the side for a couple of years until I managed to persuade

aviva_m it would be a romantic thing to do, and I asked my parents for it as a birthday present.

Unfortunately, finding a time to do it turned out to be difficult—one must fly within a couple of hours of sunrise or sunset, as otherwise the thermals are too strong; and typically during the summer (when the weather is most likely to be amenable), Sunday morning would be way too early, and Sunday afternoon either when

aviva_m was on her way back home, or I was preparing to leave Germany, so it ended up being a year and more before I finally got to take to the sky in aforementioned Gigantic Donkey:

Donkey Gigante

As you can tell from the logo, we were going ballooning in Germany. ;^b So what makes a balloon a gigantic donkey, I hear you ask. Observe closely:

D-ONKI

:o)

Up, up, and away!

Here's a photo where I got out of the basket to take a shot from the outside. Feeling vertiginous? (The white dots on the ground are sheep.)

Shot looking down out of the basket

Actually, perhaps surprisingly, I did not suffer from vertigo (or travel sickness) at all.

aviva_m thought she might, so I put her closer to the centre of the basket, and myself at the edge. The basket could accommodate up to nine people, though there were only six the time we flew.

It was very peaceful up there; when the burner was silent, you could hear dogs barking a mile away.

Sunray

This is a phenomenon I had heard of, but never before seen: the heiligenschein, in which dew creates a bright spot (though not very strongly in this case) around one's shadow on the ground:

One thing that surprised me was discovering my new(ish) ten megapixel camera has higher resolution than my eyes (even with specs). Our pilot said "We have a good view of Berlin today"—we were flying in the Brandenburg countryside—and I looked to the horizon, but could see very little. We were about 35 miles from Berlin at launch, but the wind was carrying us further away as we flew. So I took a photo at maximum zoom, and was astonished to see the Berlin skyline come into view on zooming in:

Berlin skyline

This is the Glienicker Bridge, where prisoner exchanges were carried out between the Soviet bloc and the West during the Cold War; it's also where Anatoly Sharansky was released into the West:

Glienicker Bridge

I'd said in my post three years ago that ballooning ought to liven my life up, with its mixture of one part exhilaration, eight parts pleasure and one part sheer terror, on landing. They warned us there was a possibility the basket might tip over on landing, but in reality it was perfectly controlled. The pilot "walked" the basket over a cornfield, with the tips of the stalks rustling against the bottom of the basket, and then landed precisely as we crossed the farmer's track through the field, so we could put the balloon down, pack it up and return it to the van without damaging the corn.

Afterwards, they got out a wind-up record player:

...gave us a champagne reception, and treated us to a "baptism of fire, earth [a flower] and water [champagne]":

Finally, they gave us certificates granting us "lordship" over the lands we had flown over (as was done for real by Louis XVI for the Montgolfier brothers, when they were the first people ever to fly).

aviva_m was rather nervous about the ballooning before we actually did it, but it turns out she did not really have anything to worry about; and I can recommend the experience to anyone who can afford to splash out a three-digit sum, as a one-off, on an experience that's not going to last longer than an hour (plus the time setting up and packing away the balloon).