Hot air ballooning over Luxor counts as one of my most memorable holiday experiences. But while it was a few years ago and before Egypt’s turbulent Arab Spring, it wasn’t a trip without risk.
Before our flight and since, people have been killed and injured taking part in one of the city’s great tourist outings. And the area has occasionally been targeted by terrorists bent on killing westerners and destroying the Egyptian economy. Our balloon trip was, thankfully, without incident and full of great moments:
- Being served tea on a pre-dawn crossing of the Nile, a flotilla of small craft carrying us to the west bank and our coaches
- The sheer number of balloons being prepared by crews, and the fact that we managed to avoid colliding with each other once we were in the air
- Being crammed into baskets with barely room to move, and enjoying a lift-off that was so smooth I could barely believe we’d left the ground
- Watching the sun come up in the east, painting the landscape a brilliant gold
- Seeing the stark delineation between cultivated, irrigated land alongside the Nile and the beige of the desert
- The peace, broken only by the background chatter of our fellow tourists and the blast of the flames keeping us aloft
- Flying low over ramshackle farmsteads and hamlets, seeing locals getting ready for a day in the fields and some already at work on their crops
- The mountains to the east bathed in that early morning glow, hiding the famous Valley of the Kings
- Seeing the skies around us full of colourful balloons
- Coming in to the gentlest of landings at the edge of the desert
We have a video somewhere of our trip, which our guides decided would be much better with a Celine Dion soundtrack. That ranks as the only low point of an extraordinary morning…