As you'll see in the first photo, it;s a bit of a scary contraption - nothing to put your feet on, and you're suspended in a seat below the balloon itself. Oh yeah - it's attached to the ground by a single steel cable. Who would even consider going for a ride?
DOH! 30 minutes later it was me suspended below the balloon. Now, in case you didn't know, I do not have a good head for heights [strange then that I feel absolutely fine in a plane], so this was definitely far out of my comfort zone! There was a radio available should I need to come down early, but I sensed that most of the operators knew enough English to get through the briefing :-) That and I tightened the straps after they had.... I don't like slack!
Apart from the fact that I spent half the ride counting the number of things that could go wrong [balloon rapidly deflates, cable breaks, gets really windy, seat attachment points [only two of] fail, motor to haul me in fails etc], the only big shocks I got were the sudden[!] stop at the top of the ascent and then the start of the decent.
Anyway, loads of fun! Here are the pictures!
