I might have had Gene Wilder’s song “Pure Imagination” from the movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory in mind when I got up at 3 a.m. in my room at the Temenni Evi, a charming cave hotel in Cappadocia in central Türkiye.

But I rose from bed like the Wizard on a hot-air balloon, which he described as “made of silk coated with glue to keep the gas in it,” in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

PREPPING FOR FLIGHT A hot-air balloon is being readied for a flight at the break of dawn

I should say more like Phileas Fogg in Jules Vernes’ Around the World in 80 Days, but contrary to popular notion, due maybe to inaccurate interpretations by filmmakers and movie poster artists, Phileas Fogg never once rode a hot-air balloon.
There is only one mention of the balloon in the adventure novel and only as a daydreamed remedy to missing a boat. When the ship bound for Liverpool sailed off the New York harbor without him, Phileas Fogg fantasized about making the voyage across the Atlantic on a hot-air balloon.

David Tennant as Phileas Fogg in a TV adaptation of Jules Vernes’ Around the World in 80 Days

What was fantasy for Phileas Fogg in 1873 was reality for me on a cold late-spring day this year when I woke up brutally early to catch a dream—a hot-air balloon ride through the Cappadocian sky.

Riding on a hot air balloon has been a dream, even after it first became a reality back on Sept. 19, 1783, at a demonstration organized in Versailles for the benefit of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, where the first hot-air balloon rose to an altitude of 452 meters carrying its first live passengers—a duck, a rooster, and a sheep—and landed safely about three kilometers away from where it took off. Credit must go to Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier of Annonay, France. Though China, some say, had had the idea as well as the technology for ages, these brothers are considered its pioneer developers.

ALL ABOARD Now safely in the basket, just as night turned to day, the author with, from right: Jeremy Favia, Chie Eleazar, Kris Gids, Pepper Teehankee, Lyn Ching, Cheche Moral, Berg Go, Ashley Gosiengfiao, Marbee Go, and Kevin Lapena

Balloons are a thing of magic. It doesn’t matter whether you’re young or old, but if you’ve seen the animated feature Up or earlier, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, they sure can carry your mind away and so your mind wonders if they can carry your body too. As a young boy, I would go to church every Sunday and I was always in awe of the hawkers crying “Lobo! Lobo!” with a multicolored bouquet of balloons in their hand. I was never quite happy with one balloon, though that was all my mother would agree to buy me at a time. I always wanted the whole cluster and more, enough to take me high, high, high.

It doesn’t have to be a cluster. One giant balloon is enough. It can take you over the Serengeti in Tanzania, above the dunes of the Namib Desert at Sossusvlei in Namibia, on top of the Monument Valley on the Arizona-Utah border in the US, or across the Bagan region of Myanmar.

Up in the air on a balloon, you can have a bird’s eye view of the Valley of the Kings in Egypt or of snow-capped mountains rising out of Lake Wakatipu in Queenstown, New Zealand. There’s also Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta in New Mexico as well as our very own Philippine International Hot Air Balloon Fiesta at the Clark Freeport Zone in Pampanga.

But Cappadocia is the capital of hot-air ballooning, at least as far as all lists go, where it’s always number one. For one, whereas Albuquerque hosts the hot-air balloon fiesta for nine days and Clark does the same for four days every year, it’s a balloon fiesta in Cappadocia an average of 260 days a year. So almost every day, expect the sky, especially at sunrise, to be multifold magical with hundreds of hot-air balloons in myriad colors gently navigating the open air, going as high as 900 meters or even to the height limit of 1,800 meters. The presence of all these other balloons is as much a draw as the ride itself—a perfect Instagram post or reel.

UNDER THE CAPPADOCIAN SKY Coffee or cocktails at this sky nook at the Otel Temenni Evi

Plus, Cappadocia is breathtaking. With or without the balloons making a spectacle of the sky, it is otherworldly enough to feel like a dream. Its history is what defines its boundaries—to the south by the chain of the Taurus Mountains, where Alexander the Great won the Battle of Isis in 333 BC, to the East by the upper Euphrates, which used to be part of the Roman Empire, to the north by Pontus, once a powerful kingdom that ended when the last of its Mithridatic rulers, Mithridates the Great, lost to the Romans in 63 BC, and to the west by Lycaonia and eastern Galatia. These are names you would come across when reading about the Hellenistic-Roman Age, and they sound as legendary as Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great, Spartacus, and the Ptolemies, including Cleopatra.

Oh and the landscape! Cappadocia is a magic spell. In a region called Rocky Cappadocia comprised of places like Zelve, Monks Valley, Uçhisar, Avanos, and Göreme, where we embarked on our hot-air balloon adventure, are clusters of fairy chimneys, conic masses of light, porous rock formed over millions of years by the consolidation of volcanic ash. Some are shaped like mushrooms, some are columnar, others are pointed, but most are topped by sturdier, more solid rock resting on a slender, conic stem, going from one meter to 15 meters in height.

GEOLOGIC WONDER An average fairy chimney at the Göreme Open Air Museum

In the Paleolithic period, where the first human settlement was recorded, the inside of some of these chimneys were carved to provide shelter. In the hard-to-reach chambers of these unique rock formations, Christians took refuge from Muslim Arab raids in the 11th and 12th centuries, from Mongolian incursions in the 14th century, and from Ottoman persecution in the 20th century.

CAVE ART St. Barbara's Church, a single nave chapel carved out of the hills at Göreme Open Air Museum, has the best fresco paintings in Soganli Valley

Even more fascinating, though you cannot see them from a balloon up in the air, are Cappadocia’s underground cities. I got to visit Kaymakli, about 45 minutes from Göreme. This underground settlement is about 85 meters deep, going eight stories into the ground, but only four stories are open to the public. You can go—crouched for the most part—from room to room, from story to story through low, narrow tunnels and steep staircases. There are ventilation shafts so breathing is no problem and it seems pretty complete with lots of communal spaces, storage areas, water wells, wine and oil presses, a church replete with a baptismal font, and also burial chambers.

UNDERGROUND CITY This is a typical pathway at the Keymakli underground city, eight stories deep, with communal areas, storage rooms, wine and oil presses, and a chapel replete with a baptismal font

Cappadocia, on and off a hot-air balloon, is a beautiful, beautiful ride. As above, so below and even underneath the ground.

How to get there: Travel Warehouse Inc. and Deluks Tourizm, in partnership with Oman Air, have an ongoing promo package for eight days and seven nights in Türkiye for only $1,888, inclusive of air fare, transfers, accommodations and meals, entrances to sightseeing and tours of ruins, mosques and temples, and cave dwellings, as well as tour guide and driver services and tips. Other than Cappadocia, it also covers Bursa, Pamukkale, Antalya, and Istanbul. A hot-air balloon ride is not part of the package, but if you’re already there… www.twi.com.ph