Travel - Balloon over the Masai Mara

Fireflies, tiny flickers of light, dart around the open lobby. Muted voices rise from corner seats. The coffee pot drains before it reaches me. "Don't you worry", the waiter tells me, "I'll make more." Chill morning air sends me scurrying back to my room for a sweater.

Coffee cup in hand, and for a lucky few, a wedge of ginger bread, nine of us brace against the brisk pre-dawn and clamber into Land Cruisers. Our destination somewhere "out there" in high grassland where the faintest pink of dawn has yet to touch the edge of the earth.




From the Masai Mara Serena Lodge located in southwestern Kenya, one of the famed, high plain game parks, we head for a sunrise hot air balloon ride. Barely a mile into the drive, an abrupt stop - "There," points the driver, Adam. Three lions plod into the grass. "Lucky for you they have eaten," he says, "next they sleep." A snorting tractor towing the trailer carrying Twiga, the balloon, gets ahead of us.

We catch up with the balloon on the edge of a ravine. I venture to look over. A remark by a fellow passenger calculated to spook me, leaves me wary of crocodiles. Bulky hippos sigh and moan in the water, silver moonlight reflecting off their wet hides. With a rumble of a chain, and quiet instructions from the crew chief, the balloon spreads on the rough grass, the crown facing east. In tangent with the slow emerging Sun, the gas cylinders fire. Twiga rises with the dawn.



We are up! Just the hissing of the gas burner, a creak of rigging, and intake of breath from fellow passengers. Floating, sailing, I don’t know - a sensation like nothing I've experienced before. Lightness, a great sense of lightness, as our shadow creeps over the grasslands. Clusters of trees take on mystical patterns, the river and shallow tributary brooks glisten. Peeling from the earth like synchronized swimmers, a dark mass shakes off sleep and a family of water buffalo silhouettes on the ridge line. We hover over a matriarchal group of elephants, no bulls, just eleven cows and nine youngsters. Two of the young ones lift their trunks in mock charge at the invader on high. Galloping, turning as one, a herd of Springboks out-runs us.



Lemaire, the soft-spoken young Canadian captain, briefs us on the course, alerts us to patches of pale gold Topi ethereal as phantasma in the morning light, and steers Twiga over a copse where three giraffe poke above the foliage and a fourth unfolds from the ground.


We meet the earth again with a drop and drag landing twenty yards from a white painted obelisk that marks the border with Tanzania. "Sorry folks for cutting this short but the last balloon and pilot to go over the border are still there." Lemaire isn't joking. A scan through binoculars reveals nothing man-made on the horizon but we are assured that we are within two miles of a Tanzanian Government post. "They don’t like us visiting. The pilots painted these markers white to get a better visual." The land slopes away to the Serengeti Plain- thousands of zebra and wildebeest graze below us. “Massing for the migration,” someone says, “about three weeks from now.” We are intruders. Nature rules here.


Within fifteen minutes of landing, the crew has Twiga folded and stowed. The Land Cruisers rumble in. A short ride along the border with Tanzania, and on a hilltop with a 360-degree view, a vision! Tables, white cloths, chilled champagne, omelettes cooked to order, scones, muffins, and bread still hot from the oven. Breakfast safari style.




Lemaire tells the story of the first balloon flight, and the genesis behind the champagne libation on landing. We are a quiet bunch. I'm still soaring, reluctant to have this magic end.

Note: my balloon ride was a whopping $450.00 BUT six days in June of 2009, all inclusive at the Masai Mara Serena Lodge cost $675.00 - this included round trip flight from Nairobi to the lodge , and private vehicle and driver for two, three plus hour safari trips daily. Best deal I've found in years.