Kapadokya Balloons, Nevsehir

Cappadocia is one of the world’s best places for hot-air ballooning: the wind conditions are perfect and the lunar-like landscape is breathtaking. You can balloon just about every day here from April to November.

There are a lot of companies offering ballooning here as tourism picks up, but we decided to go with one of the longest-running, well-established, not-so-cheap ones. The operators, Kaili and Lars, have ballooned in different parts of the world for more than 2 decades, so they got our money.

Like most of the operators they’ll send a car ‘round to pick you up at your hotel before dawn. They drop you at the balloon headquarters, the pilots assess what the wind’s doing that day, then they put you in vans and drive out to be picked up and ballooned over the otherworldly landscapes.

It was amazing. It was cloudy the day we went up, but we were still able to get a lot of altitude to see the scenery. We even went a mile straight up, above the clouds, and into the sunshine. The guides operated the balloons (there was a group of 3 balloons) safely, but were able to drop them down into canyons and brush the tops of olive trees!

After just over an hour drifting silently in the skies they dropped us safely in a field where we had a champagne breakfast reception.

The experience isn’t cheap - on the order of €200 per person - but you can’t do this sort of thing anywhere else. Make sure you check out the pictures.