With the Hot Air Balloon over Pai

Dee, Elena, Gerben and Mitsos gave me a hot air balloon ride in Pai for my birthday – here are the pictures! Thank you, my friends – it was fun :-)

Preparations on a field above Pai. Somehow they where not to happy with the wind direction. They started some toy helium balloons to see where they went but they all went to the same direction. After 30 minutes they where happy with the wind direction and they started the wind machines to prepare the balloon for the hot air.

Once the machines are blowing air inside the balloon everything goes quite fast.

The Yellow Monster wakes up

Once the hot air comes into play it only takes a few seconds to have the balloon up and in flight position

Almost time to board

A few seconds to go

Time to go – heat!

The ground crew gave us candy for the kids. They had a lot of fun catching it and we had fun too.

Since you move with the wind you do not feel the wind. Frome time to time there is some noise from the burner. Apart from that it is super quite. On the left of the field you can see garlic that they put there to dry

So far they went towards town with the wind. And than we went up hight in the sky to stay over the town. The draft where only a few hundred meters above ground and it was blowing towards Chiang Mai.

You can see the smoke from the fires – we could not see far – to bad :-(

Empty rice fields – it must be super nice when everything is still green.

Towards Pai we fly errrr float that is.

In the center you see the Montis Resort

Overview of Pai

The crew and the 3rd passenger. A tourist from China. The balloon, pilots and ground crew are all from China. Strange!

Pai from above

Pai airport

Happy Mitsos 1100 meters above ground

One resort that they never finished and another one where every house has a kayak to use in the gigantic pool

Pai new town – the coffee street and new market

Looking for a place to land – scaring some cows when we have to go up again to clear the trees

Interesting round circles in that rice field – the only one in Pai

Patterns & Cow’s

The last 20 minutes was a lot of fun. The balloon needs an empty rice field to land. And in between are garlic fields so they can not land there. The valley is divided by the river so the balloon was going left and right of the river and the ground crew on 2 motorbikes and one Pick-Up did try to follow. Here you can see an attempt to get a hold on the landing rope. It did not work out and they had to let go. So everybody back on the bikes and car and rushing to the next possible spot. A cat and mouse chase over temples, the river and lots of fields. Than it got to dark for pictures so this is the last one.

 
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