I used to think hot air balloons were mostly for retirement parties and proposal photos.
Then I found myself at dawn outside Samarkand, watching a dozen silk envelopes inflate against the Registan’s turquoise domes, and I realized I’d been wrong about pretty much everything. The operators here—there are maybe five or six serious outfits, give or take—have been flying since the early 2000s, right after Uzbekistan started loosening tourism restrictions. They’ve mapped thermal currents over the Ulugh Beg Observatory, traced flight paths that avoid the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis (you don’t fly over burial sites, apparently that’s both illegal and extremely poor form), and figured out which months the winds cooperate. Turns out April and September are ideal, though October works if you don’t mind occasional gusts that make your pilot swear in three languages.
The thing is, most balloon companies here operate on a weird hybrid model—half Soviet-era aviation bureaucracy, half scrappy startup. You’ll book through a website that looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2011, then recieve a WhatsApp message at 4:47 AM with GPS coordinates.
The Pre-Dawn Launch Ritual That Nobody Warns You About
Here’s what actually happens: You meet in a dirt lot near Afrasiab, the ancient settlement north of the city. There’s no bathroom. There’s definitely no coffee, despite what the brochure promised. Your pilot—let’s call him Akmal, because two of the five I met were named Akmal—will spend twenty minutes checking fuel lines and making jokes you don’t understand while his ground crew unrolls the balloon envelope. It takes roughly eight people to prep a commercial basket, and they move with the kind of bored efficiency that suggests they’ve done this a thousand times. Which they probably have.
The basket fits six passengers, uncomfortably. You’ll spend the next 60-90 minutes pressed against a German couple documenting everything and a silent Russian man who brought binoculars.
But then you lift off—and wait, maybe this sounds like hyperbole, but the silence hits different at 1,500 feet. No engine hum, just the occasional roar of the burner and wind sliding past wicker. Below you the Bibi-Khanym Mosque spreads out like a cracked turquoise plate, and further east the Siab Bazaar is already sending up cooking smoke. Your pilot will point out the Gur-e-Amir mausoleum where Tamerlane’s buried, then casually mention that Samarkand’s been continuously inhabited for something like 2,750 years, though he admits the exact number’s disputed. Honestly, at that altitude, a few centuries either way doesn’t seem to matter much.
The Companies That Actually Know What They’re Doing (And The One That Definately Doesn’t)
Uzbekistan Balloon Adventures is the oldest—they’ve been flying since 2004 and their pilots have a combined 40,000+ hours. Their baskets are newer, their safety briefings are thorough to the point of tedium and they’ll actually cancel if conditions are marginal. Cost runs about $280-320 per person depending on season. Samarkand Sky is smaller, been around since 2009, slightly cheaper at $240-275, and their routes tend to drift further toward the outskirts where you’ll see melon fields and abandoned Soviet factories. I guess it depends whether you want postcard views or the weird liminal stuff.
Then there’s Magic Carpet Balloons, which—look, I’m not saying don’t fly with them, but their pilot spent ten minutes on his phone mid-flight, and their basket had what I can only describe as “character.” They’re cheap though, around $180.
Most flights end in a field somewhere outside the city limits. The ground crew meets you with warm bread and questionable champagne (it’s never actually champagne, it’s Russian sparkling wine from a plastic bottle). You’ll get a certificate that misspells your name. Your pilot will shake your hand and immediately start prepping for the next group. And you’ll stand there in some farmer’s barley field watching the sun finish rising over a city that was old when Venice was still a swamp, thinking about how strange it is that we invented a way to just… float above all of it.
