magical…

Saturday 14th January

As most of you know, a hot air balloon ride over the Namibian desert has been a dream of mine and on my bucket list for a while and today I managed to realise that dream.

Early start! Pick up at 5:40am by a lovely guy called Samuel and when I told him that this was on my list of stuff to do before I die. He looked at me with sadness in his eyes and asked ‘when are you going to die?’ I reassured him that there’s no set date which seemed to please him – bless him – haha! 🙂

We had the pleasure of watching the crew get the baloon ready – quite the effort!

There were sixteen of us in the basket plus our ‘pilot’ – think he is more accurately called a balloonist. And he was just great! Explained a lot about the landscape, the history of the desert and about hot air ballooning with a great sense of humour.

A few interesting facts for you…

• The sand dunes in the Namib Desert grow by about an inch every 100 years
• There’s water underground in the Desert but it has taken 20,000 years to reach there
• The hot air balloon we were in weighs 1,300kg

We spent just over an hour flying around… enjoying the stunning sunrise and the amazing vistas.

I cannot really explain how I felt hovering 1,000m above the Desert… definitely felt lucky and I became quite tearful (seem to have been crying a lot over the past few months – this ticking things of the bucket list is emotional stuff!!)  – tearful because I was realising a dream but also because I was not sharing it with anyone.

Later in the day I got annoyed with myself for feeling that it would have been more special if sharing it with another person… because of course I will always remember this day and it will always be super special… it was luckily the first time I have felt like that on my travels and hopefully also the last!

Anyway, after a very smooth landing, the crew packed up the balloon and we headed to a champagne breakfast that has been set up for us in the middle of the Desert! Surreal but totally wonderful.

Our balloonist (I think his name was Manny – but you all know how rubbish I am with names so it may not be, but let’s go with it) opened the first bottle of bubbles with a machete – impressive!  And he introduced the breakfast buffet with an African saying: ‘eat well today for you don’t know what will eat you tomorrow’. And we did eat very well indeed – it was delicious.

It was the perfect way to end an extraordinary and magical experience!