The balloons fly at 5am, weather permitting, at the town of Goreme.
The landscape reminded me a little of the mesas of Meteora in Greece.
Not so extreme but still sort of ‘wow’ unusual.
There’s a billion pictures online already so I don’t need to add many more.
We didn’t fly in a balloon, not because of the 250-300 Euro cost per person.
Not because maybe the weather cancelled our flight as it has for others the past 3 days.
We are both scared of heights and would have had our eyes closed the whole flight.
Instead we went to Love Valley lookout about 4 kms from our hotel arriving there at 5am.
We had booked a taxi to take us there but it didn’t show so our hotel receptionist drove us up.
The people in Turkey are simply so kind, welcoming, and polite…except when driving.
Immediately the balloons started to lift off, only a few at a time.
30 minutes later there were perhaps 100-150 balloons in the air and we were surrounded by
2000 others at the lookout.
We walked back to our hotel which was fascinating as balloons were landing all around us.
The cars pulling a long trailer would race into a flattish bit of land in-between giant rocks.
The balloon pilot would descend to a few feet away and then hover while the trailer crew pulled ropes.
This got the balloon directly onto the trailer and the tourists got out.
They then got in a shuttle bus back to their hotels.
The next morning we got up early again but this time watched from the roof of our hotel in Goreme.
If I’m honest, I enjoyed it from the roof just as much as from Love Valley.
Coffee, no self-obsessed picture hounds or insta wanna be’s.
A memory that is burned into my brain is a pretty French woman in a bright red party frock asks my wife to take her picture which then becomes a demand for a video taken from behind her back as she stared whistfully over the valley then a sweep of the camera past her left ear to finish with a final look at her from the front. This is what she demanded of my wife and needed two or three gos before she huffed in disappointment and found someone else. I wish I had amnesia.
