Sunrise from the Sky

The burner roared. The earth fell away. Below us, the herds drew long blue shadows on the dawn-pink plain. I cried, quietly.

I am afraid of heights. Genuinely, foolishly, embarrassingly afraid. I have written travel pieces from forty-three countries and I have never once been on a balloon flight, because the idea of being suspended in a wicker basket beneath a bag of hot air seemed to me like a category of madness reserved for other, braver people.

And yet, in the Serengeti, at four in the morning, in the dark, in the cold, I climbed into one. I do not fully understand why. Sometimes, you have to.

Before

The pilot was a New Zealander named Jonas. He had been flying balloons in the Serengeti for twenty-two years. He was very calm. He was the calmest person I have ever met. I gripped the edge of the basket and asked him, in what I hoped was a casual voice, what was the worst thing that had ever happened on one of his flights. He thought about it for a long moment. "We landed in a slightly muddy field once," he said. "Took a while to clean the basket."

The burner roared. The balloon strained. And then — without any sense of motion, the way a film cuts between scenes — we were no longer on the ground.

Above

The thing nobody tells you about a balloon is the silence. There are no engines. The burner fires for five seconds at a time and then goes quiet, and in those quiet stretches you can hear the entire continent. You can hear a hyena calling from two kilometres away. You can hear a single bird. You can hear, somehow, the wind passing through the grass.

We rose to perhaps three hundred metres. The sun came up beneath us — that is the strange part, beneath us, because we were already in the sunlight while the plain was still in darkness. The light spread across the Serengeti like honey poured onto a table. I have looked at sunrises my whole life. I had never seen one happen downwards before.

"I have been to forty-three countries. None of them prepared me for the colour of that morning."

The Herds

The wildebeest were everywhere. From three hundred metres up, they did not look like animals. They looked like grain. Like a whole field of dark grain, moving slowly, in patterns that only made sense if you were above them. Threads of them, ribbons of them, stretching all the way to the horizon.

A herd of elephants stood beneath us in a clearing. We drifted directly over them. They looked up. The matriarch lifted her trunk, tasted the air, and went back to her morning.

The Landing

Jonas brought us down in a clearing he could see from the air long before any of us could see it. The landing was soft, almost insulting in how soft it was, after all the worry I had carried for the entire previous night.

A team was already waiting with a long table set in the grass. Linen tablecloths. Champagne. A full breakfast under the open sky. A few metres away, a tower of giraffes watched us eat, expressionless and slightly amused.

I am not going to pretend it cured me of my fear of heights. I am still afraid. But I learned something that morning that I have been trying to put into words for a year now, and the closest I can get is this: there are some things you only see properly when you are willing to leave the ground.