I have been afraid of heights for as long as I can remember. I avoided window seats on aeroplanes. I stayed well back from cliff edges. The idea of standing in a wicker basket thousands of metres in the air, held aloft by fire and hot air, was not something I ever imagined doing voluntarily.
Then a friend booked me a balloon ride over Cappadocia as a birthday surprise. I could not say no without explaining that I was the kind of person who held the wall at the top of staircases.
The Morning of
We were collected from our cave hotel at 4:30 am, still half-asleep, and driven to the launch site in the Rose Valley. Around thirty balloons were already in various stages of inflation, their flames roaring in the pre-dawn dark. The scale of them was shocking — each one the height of a ten-storey building.
Our pilot, Mehmet, was calm and matter-of-fact. He gave us a brief safety talk, helped us into the basket, and then, without any particular fanfare, we rose.
The Ascent
I had expected a lurch, a stomach-dropping swoop. There was none of that. The basket lifted so gently that I did not notice we had left the ground until I looked down and saw the launch crew watching us from fifty metres below.
The valley came into view. Then another valley. Then another. The fairy chimneys — those extraordinary volcanic columns, each topped with a darker cap of harder rock — stretched in every direction as the sun began to lighten the horizon.
At Height
At 1,000 metres, I stopped being afraid. I am not sure exactly when it happened. Somewhere between watching a falcon wheel below us and seeing a dozen other balloons hanging in the pink air, the fear simply left.
The silence up there was extraordinary. The only sound was the occasional rush of the burner above us, and then quiet again — the kind of quiet you forget exists.
Mehmet drifted us through a narrow canyon, close enough to the rock walls that we could have reached out and touched them. Then he climbed high again, giving us a view that seemed to take in half of Turkey.
The Landing
An hour passed in what felt like ten minutes. We landed in a field, chased the whole way by the ground crew in their van. They handed us champagne and certificates and took photographs, and I stood there in the early morning light feeling that something had changed in me.
I am still afraid of heights. But I know now that fear is not always a reason to stay on the ground.