Riding the wind

There was no blinding flash of light. There was no sudden gust of wind that stole our breath away. It came ever so gently. One moment, we were on the ground, brimming with expectation. The next moment, we were aloft, and watching the people on the ground scampering about, getting smaller and smaller as the hot air balloon took us higher and higher in the sky. We were not flying; we were riding the wind.

"You don’t feel the wind because it is not blowing against you," says Dick Plume, our balloon pilot from England. "We are moving with the wind." You do feel the wind ever so briefly during the flight when the balloon climbs or descends into air currents of different direction or speed. "We keep left if we want to fly low, and right if we want to fly high," Plume explains. With a name like that, you can’t help but feel safe in the company of this six-footer who seems born to fly. In fact, Plume has 35 years of ballooning experience behind him. And, he says, "Every year, we come here to participate in the hot air balloon festival."

The 11th Philippine International Hot-Air Balloon Fiesta was held at the South Ramp of the Philippine Air Force Complex in Clark, Pampanga from Feb. 8 to 11, 2007. "The festival had its beginnings in 1994 when then tourism secretary Mina Gabor commissioned Korean businessman and hot-air balloon pilot Sung Kee Paik and British Airways general manager John Emery to consider the staging of a balloon fiesta in the country, similar to the ones mounted in countries like Japan, the United States and Europe," Ronnie Tiotuico, Regional Director of the DOT Central Luzon Region, recalled during our media briefing. After scouring the length and breadth of the region (Subic was eliminated because of its proximity to the sea) the group decided on the former US Air Force facility in Clark Field, Pampanga — formerly the largest American airbase outside the United States, now known as the Clark Special Economic Zone — for the ballooning event.

In 1996, the Department of Tourism asked Captain Joy Roa of Air Ads, Inc., himself a licensed balloon pilot, to organize the fiesta. Since then, the event has gotten bigger each year, and now includes other aero-sport activities such as skydiving, aerobatic stunts, paragliding, motorized hang-gliding, helicopter fly-ins, light airplane balloon-bursting competitions, races between ultra-lights and motorcycles, remote-controlled model aircraft demos and kite flying. But the hot air balloons continue to be the main attraction. It starts with an early-morning liftoff and ends in the late afternoon when the hot air balloons fly back in. At night, a tethered hot air balloon is lit up, which produces an impressive visual effect called a "night glow."

The sky has always fascinated me. What can be more wondrous than to gaze at constellations of bright stars sparkling on a cloudless horizon, from a tent on a cold mountain top in the early hours past midnight? Or to watch a 15-minute fireworks display in the company of friends, raising our upturned hands and arms to the sky, as if to catch the multicolored droplets of magic falling directly above us? So when the sky beckons, how can you say no?

"We thought it would be a nice early Valentine’s treat to invite some of our media friends to ride a hot air balloon with their loved one, and experience an extraordinary date in the sky," our friend from Ogilvy explained. Coincidentally, it was also close to my birthday. The balloon ride was made possible courtesy of UPS (United Parcel Service), which has been a festival sponsor for five straight years. UPS supplied all the pilots’ equipment, the baskets and the hot air balloons for the festival.

"UPS partnered with the Clark Development Corporation (CDC) to co-host the 11th Philippine International Hot Air Balloon Fiesta," Jonel Guittap, UPS marketing supervisor, remarked. "As a major business operator in Clark, with the intra-Asia hub located in the province of Pampanga, UPS supports the CDC’s efforts in promoting tourism and boosting economic development in the community where we work and live."

A total of 18 huge shipments, weighing 230 to 600 kilos each, were brought in by UPS from the various participating countries that included Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, UK, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Two from the Philippines brought the total number to 20 balloons of different shapes and sizes, which participated in the festival.

Some of the balloons had double burners while others, like Plume’s, had a single burner (for a smaller envelope, which is the bag or what a layman may refer to as the balloon itself), which injects a flame into the envelope, heating the air within. Raising the air temperature inside the envelope makes it lighter than the surrounding air, which causes the balloon and its payload (in this case, our pilot Dick Plume; myself; and Astra, my youngest daughter and partner in adventure — snugly ensconced in a sturdy wicker and rattan basket) to rise.

There are two things you notice due to their absence — movement and sound. It is exceptionally quiet up there (except when the propane burner is firing); and secondly, you do not feel that you are moving at all. This must be the closest thing you can get to a Zen-like "being in the moment." You do get a bird’s eye view, literally, of the countryside below — the checkerboard of green rice fields, the ribbons of dusty dirt roads, the field of lahar — and at a comfortable distance, the other hot air balloons, drifting quietly in the sky. I heard it called "the gentle adventure," and it is — until you get to the rough landing.

The first time we hit ground was not planned at all. "The wind kept blowing off the flame so I could not get enough hot air into the envelope to check our descent," Plume later explained. I did not notice we were descending until our basket hit the ground, not once but a number of times, then tipped to one side. Plume finally managed to get us upright and back aloft. Although ruffled and slightly shaken, we went on with the race.

It is called the "Hare and Hound" race. The Hare balloon sets off ahead of all the other balloons that follow later and, like Hounds, chase after the Hare. After flying for some time, the Hare lands and lays out a white cloth with a bull’s eye target on the ground. The Hounds then drop their markers, and the marker that lands closest to the bull’s eye gets the highest score. Actually, it is more a test of accuracy than speed. We watched Plume’s red marker with our balloon’s number 20 drift down in an irregular spiral until it hit the ground, perhaps about 20 meters away from the bull’s eye.

We must have been riding the wind for about 30 minutes or so when Plume pointed to the long dike, which was built to check the flow of lahar after the Pinatubo eruption, stretched out in the distance. "We will be landing in the field before that dike," he told us. This time, we were ready – we flexed our knees, as we were instructed; held tightly to the rope handles on the sides of the basket; and braced ourselves for the landing. But you can never be ready for something like this, I guess. In his book Defining the Wind, Scott Huler wrote, "I learned fact number one about the wind: Don’t make plans that depend on it. The wind has plans of its own."

As Plume explained to us, the wind is too strong. The wind here is unlike any found in other countries, I’ve heard. "I should have chosen a bigger field," Plume said in hindsight. We hit the ground. Our basket tipped to one side and started pounding against the dike’s wall. I heard Astra saying "Keep calm, keep calm" in an even tone, like a mantra. No sound came out of me. In the absence of words, there was total presence of mind. I concentrated on enduring the 220 pounds of Plume’s weight that was pressing hard against my side.

Everything else that followed was anti-climax. The envelope was deflated. We climbed out of the basket. The schoolchildren on their mid-morning break in Barangay Hacienda near Porac, where we landed, milled around the deflated balloon, together with their mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, grandparents, neighbors, and stray dogs. They helped Plume pack the envelope back into its carrying bag. The chaser vehicle, an original World War II army jeep, came to fetch us and brought us back to the airfield in Clark. We shook Plume’s hand and he promised to send us our certificates. "That’s one more item you can check off your ‘to do’ list," Astra told me, just as I was starting to wonder if they offered tandem skydiving at the festival.