Soaring over Cappadocia in a hot air balloon is a memorable experience.

To do it, you get up extremely early in the morning, so early that many people just stayed up so that they wouldn’t chance missing it.

You are driven out to the location where the balloons take off and  they start unrolling and inflating them while you stand there in the cold and dark night air. It takes some time before the air in the balloon is hot enough that the balloon even lifts off the ground.

The balloon will be vertical for a fair amount of time before it is ready to take off laden with people.  So you will have to wait patiently for the pilots to indicate you can get on.

Once you get on, they’ll wait until it is ready to take of with all the added weight, and then they’ll remove the weights holding it down and you’ll go up in the sky as if you were on a cherry picker, but then you’ll go higher, and your brain will register that there is nothing attached to you and you just have to trust the pilot.

With luck, you get up before the sun is over the horizon and get to see the sunrise with the light making extremely long shadows from the shapes carved in stone.  You’ll be in a large  area with dozens of other balloons, which you can often get great pictures of with great rock formation backgrounds.

Long before you are ready, the ride is done and you land on the ground and wait to be returned to your hotel.  Often you help deflate the balloons by walking on them and pushing them down.

It is very cold in the morning, and quite cold when you are up in the balloon so be sure to bring layers.