Bird's eye view: Israel from a hot air balloon
To mark Sukkot, when many Israelis take to nature, a reporter has the incredible experience of soaring above Israel at dawn in a hot air balloon.
"Why do I have to get up now?" I ask myself when my phone's alarm clock beeps. It's completely dark outside. The screen says it's 3:20am.
Oh, right, the hot air balloon, I remember, and the momentary rage of waking up is balanced out.
It takes an hour of driving on dark, empty roads to reach the isolated field next to Afula. There's a small table with coffee, tea and cakes, surrounded by 16 people who also cut short their night's sleep and arrived here to get inside a straw basket and soar into the sky using the oldest of all flight technologies.
One group is celebrating a mother's birthday and a couple is celebrating their anniversary. Turns out, flying in a hot air balloon has become a popular gift for special occasions.
As we struggle to wake up, the team is already starting to inflate the huge balloon. First, giant fans stream air into the balloon, which lies on its side and covers an entire field. In the second stage, hot air is inserted using huge burners. The difference in temperature between the hot air in the balloon and the cooler air outside causes the balloon to rise, even though it weighs three tons.
A quarter of an hour goes by and the balloon is full of hot air and ready to be launched. The excited passengers jump on board one at a time. The basket is partitioned, which four people in each little section. The pilot is in the center, navigating the balloon towards the final destination – one of the harvested wheat fields in the area. The pilot cannot say exactly where, as it depends on the wind and on where the balloon decides to land.
When the sun in the east starts to rise and the valley is lit by dawn's yellow and orange, the team on the ground unties the cables and the balloon slowly rises into the sky. First we float above the new neighborhood being built in Afula, then continue east towards the range of green mountains, and less than half an hour later we are already high over the valley, as though we were on the highest balcony in Israel.
Everything is beautiful from up here – the fields, even those that haven't been plowed, look neat and picturesque and the sea sparkles. The valley wakes up to a new morning, and we see it all – there's nothing more beautiful.
My eyes, still bleary from the particularly early wake-up time, are much more forgiving now.
The balloon seems to be moving slowly, but we are actually moving at 50 kilometers an hour. The hour and a half of relaxed, glorious flight went by too fast, as though 15 minutes had passed.
Height is reduced by injecting cooler air into the balloon, and eventually we land in one of the fields.
A ground team is waiting in the field and has already set a table for a breakfast in nature – but not before two bottles of champagne, an old tradition for pilots of hot air balloons when they land.
