Up, up and away in Cappadocia
From 6,000 feet above sea level the world seems a still and peaceful place. Or at least it does if you’re floating above Cappadocia in a hot-air balloon on a day when the wind is so gentle that the basket would have been overtaken by the average snail.
Last week the arrival of friends offered the perfect excuse for me to take to the air for the third time in 15 years. And, oh, what a change it was from the first time!
That was back in 1999 when I was a Göreme newbie. Hard though it is to believe it now, the hot-air ballooning business was then in its infancy, only recently established in its own office and with just one balloon to its name. In those days the two pilots wintered in France, which meant that I’d been living in the village for many months before I even saw a balloon floating over my house.
Even more unbelievably, in those days there weren’t always enough customers to fill a single basket. That being the case, there would be a last-minute ring around friends to find someone keen to act as ballast and enable the flight to go ahead.
Now barely a day goes by without multiple balloons looming on the horizon. On the particular mid-February day that we took to the skies, I counted at least 43 balloons keeping us company up there.
That wasn’t the only thing that had changed over the years. There was always champagne to celebrate the end of the journey, and there were always personalized certificates to commemorate the adventure. But breakfast? No such mollycoddling back in the early days, I’m afraid.
Today, though, the pick-up vehicle dropped us off at the Butterfly Balloons office where breakfast buns, strawberries and welcoming cups of coffee awaited us. “We have to get going now. You don’t want to miss the sun rise,” the unfortunate person tasked with rounding us all up again called out, because in truth the breakfast was so pleasant that it was easy to forget why it was that we’d dragged ourselves out from our nice warm beds at such an ungodly hour anyway.
Up on the ridge between Göreme and Uçhisar our balloon was already semi-inflated by the time we arrived. Then up we drifted, so slowly, so gently that you could almost have forgotten how unnatural what you were doing actually was.
And at once below us there spread out the spectacular sight of the Cappadocian scenery. Ahead, the sun was popping out like an orange Smartie from behind Mt. Erciyes. Below us, the roots of the dormant vines splattered the ground with strange whorls while the lines drawn in the soil by the ploughs wound back and forth in long, thin undulations. Behind us, the landsnail-shaped rock of Uçhisar Castle rose up triumphantly like a flamenco dancer twirling her skirts around her. Ahead of us, the most graphically phallic of Göreme’s fairy chimneys drew gentle titters from the women in the basket.
All sense of time seemed to vanish up in the sky so I could hardly believe it when we landed (perfectly, on the back of the pick-up trailer) to find that just over an hour had passed. What an incredible treat, it had been. No wonder hot-air ballooning over Cappadoca is now a multi-million-euro business, I thought as I sipped that congratulatory glass of champagne.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
via – Today’s Zaman.
