Up, Up, and Slightly Terrified: Our First Hot Air Balloon Ride

A hot air balloon ride over Luxor takes off just as the sky begins doing its best impression of a watercolour painting — pinks and oranges bleeding into each other over the Valley of the Kings, hundreds of feet below you. It’s consistently ranked as one of the most magical ways to take in the West Bank’s ancient wonders. It is also, as we discovered, one of the more sleep-deprived ways to do it.

None of us had ever been in a hot air balloon before, so this was very much a first. We woke up at 3am, still slightly teary-eyed from the opera the night before, running purely on excitement and the kind of manic energy that only a 3am alarm can produce. A van collected us from the hotel at 4:30am and took us to a ferry crossing, where we boarded a boat with other guests booked through the same balloon company. Hot drinks were served — coffee and tea — and we cracked open the breakfast boxes we’d arranged with the hotel the night before, eating while the boat waited to set off and the crew ran through instructions.

I’ll admit we felt a bit self-conscious realising nobody else had thought to bring a breakfast box. In our defence, we had absolutely no idea how long this whole thing would take or whether we’d make it back to the hotel before starving, so we figured showing up over-prepared was the safer bet. Turned out we had plenty of time on the boat to eat, so: slightly smug, mildly overprepared, no regrets. After crossing, another van took us the rest of the way to the launch field, about fifteen minutes further.

The Field at Dawn

By the time we arrived, some balloons were already airborne while others were still being inflated on the ground. The sky at that hour has a kind of stillness to it that’s hard to describe — soft light, quiet field, giant fabric envelopes slowly filling with hot air all around us. It felt genuinely magical, in a way that’s easy to be cynical about until you’re actually standing in it.

Then came the part nobody warns you about: we all had to fill out a form with our name and body weight. Weight. In writing. To be read aloud by the Captain, who was dividing everyone into the balloon’s eight sections and needed the numbers balanced evenly across all of them. There is a very specific kind of dread that comes with silently hoping your section assignment happens without anyone announcing your weight to the group. It did not always work out that way for everyone. Character building, truly.

There’s no tidy staircase into a hot air balloon basket, for the record — you either clamber over the side yourself or get boosted in by one of the roughly twenty ground crew holding everything steady, with a truck anchoring the whole basket to the ground while people load in. Once the Captain was satisfied everyone was in and balanced, we finally lifted off. Slow, steady, and somehow both terrifying and thrilling in the exact same breath.

Up in the Air

Floating above the ground felt exactly as magical as advertised. Our flight ran about an hour, cruising somewhere between 300 and 600 metres up. There were easily twenty-plus people in our basket, split across those eight sections, and despite the numbers, everyone had comfortable room to move and take photos. From up there we spotted Hatshepsut Temple — our opera venue from the night before, looking entirely different in daylight — the full sweep of the Valley of the Kings, and the sharp green patchwork of farmland hugging the Nile below.

Landing is its own little production. The Captain scouts for an empty stretch of ground that isn’t, crucially, someone’s crop field, while coordinating with the ground crew and truck below. Once everything lines up, the Captain calls out the landing position — a half-squat, brace-and-hold kind of pose — and down we came. The ground crew grabbed the basket almost the second it touched down, roped it to the truck, and had us climbing out quickly while they got to work deflating the balloon the moment the burner cut out. The whole process took maybe twenty minutes, and watching the crew move through it so efficiently was honestly as impressive as the flight itself.

We’d assumed we’d carry straight on to explore the West Bank from there, but the actual plan was to head back to the hotel first, where we’d meet up with our guide for the Valley of the Kings and the rest of the West Bank sites properly.

What I Thought of the Balloon Ride

I loved it. All of us did. We flew with Dream Balloons (still operating in Luxor as of this writing, for anyone wondering), and found the company representative, the Captain, and the ground crew all thoroughly professional throughout. There was also a cameraman filming the whole experience, with footage available to purchase afterward if you want more than your own shaky in-basket photos.

On price: Luxor balloon rides are remarkably good value compared to other bucket-list balloon destinations. We paid around $80 per person, which at the time felt like a steal next to Cappadocia’s roughly $260 per person for a similar experience. If you’re booking today, expect a fairly wide range depending on operator and season — anywhere from around $50 for a standard flight up to $100+ for premium or private options, generally cheaper outside the busy November–February winter season.

On safety — because I know it’s the question hovering over anyone reading this before their own flight: yes, I was a little nervous going in, and I did my homework beforehand. Egypt’s ballooning industry has had a genuinely rocky safety history, including a serious 2013 incident, and at the time of our trip, operations had only recently resumed after a temporary suspension following a separate incident involving strong winds that blew a balloon off course into the southern desert. Local authorities grounded all operators, inspected every company for compliance, and only reopened flights once they’d confirmed safety standards were being met.

The regulatory picture has kept tightening since. As of 2026, operators are required to have their balloons fitted with GPS tracking and high-frequency communication equipment, and reputable companies now only work with pilots who’ve logged well over a thousand flight hours. If you’re choosing an operator today, it’s worth specifically asking about pilot experience and current safety certification rather than just comparing prices — a few dollars saved isn’t worth cutting corners on this particular activity.

There are plenty of balloon operators in Luxor, and most can be booked easily once you’re actually in the city rather than needing to lock it in months ahead. We went through Waleed, who partnered us with Dream Balloons, and the whole arrangement was smooth start to finish.

By the time we were back at the hotel showering off the early-morning chill, our guide was already waiting to take us properly through the Valley of the Kings and the rest of the West Bank — tombs, temples, and (inevitably) more heat than any of us were prepared for. That one’s next.