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Gustasp Irani

It is an experience of a different kind for Gustasp Irani, who hovers above Cairns, Australia, in a hot air balloon.

We were the lucky ones: the friendly fickle wind stole an extra 10 minutes of flying time when it blew us away from the clearing for which we were headed. Johan, our pilot, had no other option but to fire the hot air balloon up into the clear morning skies above the coastal city of Cairns in northeast Australia. When finally we touched down, the landing was perfect and gentle, in the middle of a rust-gold field stacked with recently harvested bales of grass.

I could not have asked for a more dramatic finale to a spectacular adventure that started at the unearthly hour of 4.30 a.m. Under cover of darkness, we were driven from our hotel to a little clearing beyond the outskirts of Cairns, where balloons rolled out across the fields were being inflated with the help of enormous fans. Controlled blasts of hot air from gas burners forced them to rise up into the sky. This was the moment of truth. Struggling to keep our impatient anticipation and nervous excitement under wraps, we climbed into the basket; four in each of the four compartments with Johan manning the gas burners from the central slot.

The pre-flight instructions were brief: no smoking. We were then made to practise brace positions for landing: a semi-squatting stance with backs pressed against the wall of the basket. Satisfied with our clumsy and nervous efforts, Johan fired a series of short bursts of hot air into the enormous textile dome above us. And we had lift off; it was the smoothest ascent imaginable as slowly, ever so slowly, we started to rise. Below us our sister balloon was preparing to launch and with each blast of the burner, it lit up like a spectacular flaming torch flaring out of the earth shrouded in predawn shadows.

Gently we floated up into a dusky sky that was soon washed by the flaming colours of the rising sun. And as the sun peered over the scattering of clouds loitering around the horizon, golden shafts streaked across the sky and exploded in bursts of light against the balloon hovering around us. The veil of mist below us slowly started to lift, revealing a landscape painted with farmlands, sugarcane fields, lush rainforests and homesteads. Flocks of lily-white birds, flying in formation, swept across the tapestry dotted with colourful balloons.

We drifted through this ever-changing canvas, mesmerised by its brilliant hues. The image of two balloons hovering above us in a clear blue sky and two more emerging from the translucent white shroud of mist below us is frozen in eternal memory. Suddenly a shaft of sunlight cast a sharp shadow of our balloon on a low-lying cloud and enveloped it with a ring of rainbow colours.

According to Johan hot air balloons have the right of way in the sky and this is because they are at the mercy of whimsical winds. The only way a pilot can navigate is by taking them up or down to catch the wind currents in the different strata of the atmosphere and pivot the passenger basket around on its axis.

All too soon we started to make our final descent; our time in the sky was almost over. Then thanks to a sudden change of wind we got another 10 minutes in the air. When finally we landed, we had covered 5 km, reached a maximum speed of 25 kph and soared up to a height of 3,700 ft above sea level.

Quickly we switched places in the basket with people taking the second-half of the flight and watched as Johan fired the burners and lifted them up into their flight of pure fantasy. Back on the ground, we followed their flight across the sky in a van and were at hand to help roll up the balloon and load it along with the basket on the trailer when it eventually floated down to earth.

Once this demanding yet fun-filled task that required a lot of teamwork was accomplished, we drove down to Tjapukai, an aborigine theatre just outside Cairns, for a lavish champagne breakfast. We, however, stayed off the bubbly; the hot air balloon flight was genuine vintage stuff that took us soaring, both body and spirit, to new and ecstatic heights.

Pictures by the author

Fact file

Cairns, on the northeast coast of Australia, is one of seven gateway cities in the country with international airports. The city is a popular base of Great Barrier Reef cruise companies. It is also famous for its beaches, rainforest, entertainment facilities and adventure sport such as bungy jumping, all terrain vehicle and horseback rides, sky diving and, of course, hot air ballooning.

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