Above the Serengeti

There are not many things we would enthusiastically suggest waking up before sunrise for, but hot air ballooning over the Serengeti is one of them. The morning starts early, and when we say early, we mean properly early. Coffee helps. So does standing beside the balloon as it slowly inflates in the dark, with the first hint of light starting to creep across the plains. By the time the burner fires and the basket begins to lift, the alarm clock has already become a fairly distant concern.

The take-off is far gentler than most people expect. One minute you are standing on the ground, the next the safari vehicles look tiny below you and the Serengeti suddenly opens up in a completely different way. From a vehicle, your attention is naturally drawn to whatever is right in front of you. From the air, you start to understand the scale of the landscape, with rivers cutting through the plains, kopjes breaking up the grasslands and game trails running for kilometres between water, shade and grazing areas.

The wildlife looks completely different from above too. Zebra and wildebeest stop looking like individual sightings and start forming these huge moving patterns across the plains. Giraffes are surprisingly easy to pick out between the acacia trees, while elephants appear as small grey shapes crossing open ground or gathering near water. You might see hippos packed into a river bend, antelope moving through the grasslands or animals following tracks that are almost impossible to notice from ground level.

If the Great Migration is in the area, this is where the scale of it really lands. On a game drive, you might spend time with one section of a herd and feel as though you are surrounded by wildlife. From the balloon, you can see just how far those herds stretch and how they move through the landscape as a whole.

It is less about getting close to one lion or elephant and more about seeing how the Serengeti works when you pull the camera back.

The other thing that surprises people is how quiet it is. Between bursts from the burner, you are simply drifting with the wind. There is no engine noise and no road beneath you, so for long stretches it is just the balloon, the plains and whatever is moving below. The exact route changes every morning because the wind decides where you are going, which is probably just as well because there is not much point arguing with it.

The flight usually lasts around an hour before the pilot finds somewhere suitable to land. Sometimes that landing is beautifully smooth. Sometimes it gives everyone something to laugh about afterwards. Either way, you finish with a sparkling wine toast before heading to breakfast, which is set up out in the bush rather than back at camp.

And the breakfast is a proper part of the experience.

Long tables are laid out on the plains with linen, hot coffee, fresh juice and a full cooked breakfast waiting for you. You are sitting in the middle of the Serengeti with nothing much around except open grassland, birds moving overhead and, if you are lucky, zebra or wildebeest wandering somewhere in the distance. After the early start, the flight and the landing, there is something very satisfying about settling in with a glass of sparkling wine and eggs while the bush carries on around you.

It also gives the morning time to breathe. You are not bundled straight back into a vehicle the second you land. You sit, eat, compare what everyone spotted from the balloon and let the whole experience settle in before continuing with the rest of the safari day. By that point, most people have also conveniently forgotten how early they had to get up.

We would absolutely still keep the game drives. The balloon does not replace them, and it should not. A vehicle gets you close to the wildlife, lets you follow individual animals and gives you those intimate sightings safari is famous for. The balloon gives you something completely different: scale, movement and a much better understanding of how the whole landscape fits together.

For us, that is what makes it worth doing. You spend so much of a safari looking out across the Serengeti from ground level that having one morning above it changes the way you see the place afterwards.