Ballooning in Tuscany

Ladders, flat roofs, I have never been great with heights (a relative term). I remember being ridiculed as a ten or eleven-year old for not jumping out of the oak tree in our back garden. Both my friends had done it, and now my Dad was a brooding presence exhorting me to do the same. I bottled out of course. Perhaps that was the day I finally confirmed I was not made of The Right Stuff.

So when, around 40 years later, I was happily informed that my first 50th birthday present was to be a hot air balloon ride, I worked pretty hard at spontaneous enthusiasm. My wife's brother and family live on the edge of Montepulciano, a typically breathtakingly beautiful Tuscan hill town. I was to go, three days later, to a smaller version of such towns and be whisked off by "Robert the American" to see this glorious landscape from above. For someone so woefully introspective and analytical I did a great job of Simply Not Thinking About It. Little bubbles of hope rose and popped as the weather led each evening's phone call to announce a day's delay. But third time unlucky. Thursday evening would be our flight home from Florence airport. But Thursday morning was to see me on my maiden balloon voyage from someone's back garden about an hour and a half from Peretola.

It was foggy. I woke up, looked outside and it was foggy. Kind of. The sky was the clearest blue, to the west all was as clear as a bell, but huge billowing banks of fog were rolling along to the east. Montepulciano was completely hidden! I gallantly suggested that I only wanted "to go up" if I could see another Province, and would be happy to delay until our next Italy trip. But since it was only 7 a.m. it was agreed that we should drive the twenty minutes to Robert's house and see what he thought. During the twenty-minute journey my main concern was for my digestive system -- coffee or not? Coffee always works for me in a morning.

Our arrival was not auspicious. Down a fairly steep, very rutted track, even by Italian standards, swing in to the yard and pigs. Large black Gloucester Old Spot-looking pigs held in by yellow tape. Our two families decanted from the cars as a rather Glawsha --sounding and looking -- woman boomed at us to move further away as she distributed the morning pigswill. Worse, there was no fog here, and we were in a dip, a small valley, albeit surrounded by trees.

I could not have been more wrong. Liz subsequently proved a charming, totally pragmatic and organised hostess who apologised for the pigs (the young ones had escaped) and made great coffee. Robert had appeared, striding down the small field dressed in khaki shirt, plus fours, desert boots and round steel-rimmed glasses. He was as English as I, and markedly more eccentric. In fact he spent the first ten minutes of my special day rapt in wonder at the mechanics of a folding bicycle that one of my would-be ballooning companions magicked out of the boot of her hire car. I still can't see the relevance of that moment, and Robert's very wobbly riding attempts did not fill me with confidence.

Having stridden (rather than ridden) up the valley to check the weather conditions Robert pronounced himself satisfied and my fate was sealed. Stage one of the journey was, however, wondrous. Unpacking, preparing and inflating a hot air balloon is a magnificent cooperative process, our version of which had elements of Heath Robinson, Monty Python and the Montgolfiers. Unfolding a huge amount of deflated balloon, setting up portable fans, untangling wires, strategically positioning sticks in a basket, and above all watching the whoosh of the gas flames shooting into the Moby Dick mouth of the balloon took my mind off everything and was terrific fun. At one point the four children were swallowed up, Jonah-like, into the belly of the stripy dirigible -- they giggled and gawped with delight. I too was a child again as I did everything I was told, trying my best to be precise and appear seasoned. Robert and Liz were organised and methodical in a slightly ramshackle way, which was reassuring in its Englishness. My ballooning colleagues were two Australian (male)-American (female) couples, and they did exactly as they were told. It was the only time the Aussies kept quiet all morning.

By now I was strangely happy, and felt important in my role as key helper, volunteer and participant. The vast balloon calmly filled and grew, along with my karma. We had our brief but invaluable briefing about where and how to stand in the balloon, and even Robert's quaint instruction on when to turn our backs (if we were going to hit anything) caused no tubes to tighten. A quick blast of the triple vertical flamethrower proved the wisdom of the instruction to bring a hat (so that your head doesn't burn ) and then suddenly we were off. One moment I was looking across at my family, the next I was looking down on them.

I loved it. Every single moment of the two hours from our slow ascent over Robert's sprawling property (Robert's "My God, we've only been there five years and it looks like the town dump" was met with a laconic Aussie "it looks like great work in progress" followed by gales of laughter) to our ungainly but softish bump stop landing was addictively magical.

I cannot imagine more perfect conditions. The basket never even swayed (I never thought about it until asked after the event), the breeze was light and refreshing, Robert was massively entertaining and informative, and the views were, well, painterly. And the light. I have owned a camera for 44 years, I am still but a willing -- and agnostic -- amateur; but it was God's light that morning, particularly the first hour. From low-angled rays of sunlight, sculpted by the rolling mists as it parted the trees, to the cutting blue-gold clarity that even medium altitude brings, the light was my reward. Tuscany's beauty, so beloved by Americans, Germans, and The Sunday Times, can never look better. The farmland of the Val di Chiana and Val d'Orcia had recently been ploughed, which, particularly in the latter valley, can lend a harsh, barren almost moonscape-like quality (guess where our property is). But not this morning. The counterpoint of rolling brown, lined fields and swirling green forestry was stunning. Small farms (and the odd castle) appeared like jewelled islands as perfect as any tropical atoll; tractor and plough trails mimicked Maori tattoos.

There was fog, but it lay only in selected valleys, throwing tree-lined ridges into sharp relief. Montepulciano, in the distance behind us, was recognisable only by its two distinctive towers, whereas Siena in the distance ahead, appeared like a Swiftian island floating above a sea of cloud. As the Australians fired questions about all things Tuscan, Robert was the perfect knowledgeable guide. He knew every hilltop village -- they do all start to look a teeny bit similar -- every moraine, every Etruscan burial site. The castle was owned by a man who had won the contract to build all the bridges over the A1 -- I sensed a slight implication of typical Italian dealings? At one point his descriptions and signals had us feeling the narrowness of the whole country as we could almost see both coasts, and this despite the stupidity (Robert had views of his own) of Italian airspace bureaucracy -- something to do with a ridiculously low maximum cruising height (do balloons cruise?).

Tranquillity. To hang out in (definitely in) a balloon and drift along in a silence punctuated only by the occasional blast of the flamethrower or an Aussie voice announcing the latest GPS readings is tranquil bliss. I took photos, hung out (possibly open-jawed) and was all but anti-social. I wanted to either be on my own, or share all this bright-and-beautifulness with my family. And we had a laugh -- at different things. My favourite moment was towards the end as Robert, in air-to-ground contact with Liz via a very long piece of string tied between two chopped tomato cans, tried to pick out a landing spot. Despite their jointly encyclopaedic knowledge of the terrain, Robert eventually pulled out an O/S map, which, at however many hundred feet up, looked slightly comical to this ballooning veteran. Our Aussie friend was not to be outdone -- literally - as he seemed to be able to locate individual trees on his hand-held device --all as Robert was trying to find the most convenient map-folding pattern which I can't even do in our living room. Depressingly GPS won as Robert increasingly looked over at the small grey screen and my jokes about working out how my phone works fell (deservedly) on deaf ears.

And so to the landing. We missed the first spot, at which point I came to appreciate fully the dedication of not only Liz in the support vehicle, but also my whole family who were schlepping around somewhere below, forced to follow endless white gravelled roads and turn around in the gateways to farmers' fields as we arrowed on and on. At one point Robert seemed to hide us for a while in a small valley, perched atop what looked like a large mulberry bush, as he regaled us with stories of landing in fruit trees so that children could scrump. It was all a bit Brer Rabbit, but I was enthralled by it all. Eventually slightly frenzied communication to those below kind of picked out a ridge up ahead with a house at on end. Robert was clearly keen not to overshoot a second time, and slowly and deliberately we descended towards the middle of an uphill incline (do we turn our backs yet?). Inch perfectly we hovered less than six inches from the ground and I jumped out, the objective being to half guide, half bump the basket up the slope as far as possible to minimise the amount of non-balloon powered effort it would take to get the whole gubbins to the top. Aussie number one threw a well-timed spanner in the works by recognising that there was a barbed wire fence above us, over which the balloon was about to drape itself, and a steep drop on the other side of the ridge. And so, after a couple of abrupt, undignified bumps, the balloon came to halt and tipped on its side. Watching from 6 or 7 metres away it was akin to witnessing the death of an enormous animal, slowly toppling over, helpless against the momentum of its own swaying, falling bulk.

The sight of a peroxided, middle-aged Italian woman of a certain age, swathed in a bright blue fluffy dressing gown and mules (it was 10:15 am by now) shriekily asking us what was happening as she shuffled up the white road from the house banished such thoughts. Robert, in his perfect Italian, explained that no, we had not crash landed, that he hoped she did not mind at this slight inconvenience, and that really we were all perfectly fine because he was a professional Montgolfiero. She was charmed and reassured, only to reappear an amazingly short time later, done up to the nove, in her cute little Jeep. A bottle of wine, complete with hastily applied balloon label, was handed over for her troubles, and I almost expected her to propose to Robert.

As we clumsily part-folded the balloon our ground crew appeared, and within moments Liz had produced locally-baked fruit bread and focaccia, anchovy and tomato pizza, bottles of Prosecco and local red wine, slabs of local Pecorino (sheeps' cheese) and fruit. There was even water. The children tucked in and stood around, gazing at the dead balloon. Me? I was still up there, pondering over something Robert had said. I had asked when and why he had started ballooning. "Sixteen years ago, result of a mid-life crisis kind of a thing, still haven't sorted it out really".

Fifty years old, me? Addicted to ballooning, me?