Ballooning outside Addis
Last weekend overflowed with another religious holiday. Timkat or Epiphany - the celebration of Jesus’s baptism. Orthodox Christians here in Ethiopia really put on their best show for Timkat. The faithful parade around replicas of the Ark of the Covenant while wearing flowing white garb (see the pic in the gallery below of Sarah and a colleague getting into the spirit for a ground-breaking ceremony at St. Paul Hospital and Millenium Medical College). Streets were dysfunctionally closed and the crowds swelled to overwhelming levels in pockets of piety scattered throughout Addis.
The three-day weekend offered another opportunity for travel. All the time we recently spent away from Addis put a damper on our eagerness, but options were discussed. We can hardly believe how few weekends remain when we don’t have something scheduled. So rather than jet off to another place (Nairobi, Kenya was top of that list), a unanimous family vote kept us in Addis. We explored local options that might not be hampered by Timkat activities.
I got an email last month from Bram van Loosbroek, the owner and pilot of a hot-air ballooning company operating out of Addis. Bram’s company - Abyssinia Ballooning - gets great reviews and he’s carrying a few decades of experience as a pilot. At first blush, ballooning fits somewhere into the neighborhood of bungee jumping or sword-swallowing on my list of adventures worth pursuing. Yet Bram’s persistence and excitement for ballooning landed well with me. After getting some questions answered and another family vote, we committed to a sunrise flight.
Well before dawn, we were picked up in a white van not far from our apartment. There would soon be 11 paying customers aboard, including us. Only a pair of Bulgarians had been up in a balloon once before. Bram drove like a Formula One racer, hornswoggled into marshaling a van around the track. The roads in Addis are often stomach-churning. Outside of the City, they’re almost criminal. Chalk up the rides there and back as part of the challenge. It’s 30-minutes to the nondescript launch site, West of Addis in a sparsely populated area of rolling hills called Menagesha (or Holeta). It was an hour before dawn when we spilt from the van. The headlights of the retrieval truck used to chase us down illuminated the balloon inflation operation. Bram’s team served tea, coffee and cookies while we waited. A huge fan got the massive red sack of fabric with a Zemen Bank advertisement up off the ground, and then the balloon burner got the hot air cranking. After maybe 10 minutes of blowin’ and burnin’, the basket tipped up. A few made their way to the field’s edges to pee one the last time as the first hints of daylight turned dark to grey. With well-rehearsed instructions from Bram, we all climbed up and into the 480-kilo-load basket.
I’ll largely let the pics below speak for themselves. We’d lucked into a perfect morning. The launch was smooth and the light from the pre-dawn turned from grey to a rose gold that allowed for easy focus on the mountains and surrounding high plains. To the east, everyone’s gaze fell to the Gefersa Reservoir (partly man-made thanks to dams constructed between the 1930s and ‘60s, that supplies some of Addis’s water supply). Entoto to the north and Yeka to the east over whose flanks the sun rises, factored into everyone’s selfies. The fields, largely clear-cut of forests, have some scattered new developments as Addis extends itself out into Oromia. I can grasp a better sense of Addis from floating along the edge of it for not quite 90 minutes.
The sun “flopped up” as it does this close to the Equator, according to Bram. Bram’s commentary on the history of ballooning punctuated the experience. Not long after, we found ourselves right on track for the landing zone. It’s hard to gauge how quickly you’re descending in a balloon, but the closer we got to the ground the more our traversing speed seemed a reality. We could see farmers with donkeys below, and a handful of kilometers behind could even make out the white van and truck for the basket on their way to meet us. Our landing instructions (“back to the direction of landing” and “hang on”) didn’t fully illustrate the gentle bumping and dragging that came before a full stop. I was tasked with the early exit to grab and run with the rope I could only assume might loft me above the treetops if the wind came up. Which it didn’t. The crowd of locals that would soon gather to gauge whatever sort of idiots plopped down this morning wordlessly watched the deflating and chase truck arrival like just another part of the day in Menagesha.
We had a champagne (make mine orange juice) toast followed by a baptism to commemorate our first time up and back in a balloon. No spillage on the Bulgarians. More stories accompanied from Bram about the origins of it all back in the 19th Century. Soon enough, our sturdy flute glasses were back in their case and we began bouncing along the longer and much rougher path back into Addis.
A delicious breakfast and conversation followed at the Louvre Hotel (big thumbs up on that charming oasis). As we settled up, Bram shared some stories of the challenges and rewards of setting up this ballooning company in Ethiopia. He’s eight years into it and shows no signs of turning back now. We met a lovely young pair of friends who grew up in Addis and used this as a challenge to overcome a fear of heights and just plain get out to expand their boundaries. Bottom line being - I wholeheartedly recommend a ballooning adventure. I’m now a big fan of what goes on up there. At least Bram’s efforts in Ethiopia, in particular. Those with funny tummies may not dig the van ride back and forth (pro tip - pee before leaving). The upside is worth it, no doubt. Ciao.
