A breath-taking second flight over the Mogotes of Vinales

Saturday the 31st of March

A stunning flight with Iseult over the Mogotes of Vinales

ready for take off

Not having any test balloons to assess the winds posed a bit of a problem this morning as the surface winds changed every 10 minutes. So we drove around the area desperately trying to find new last-minute launch sites which proved tricky. 

Happy in the air

In the end, the front garden of a private house was found to be the most suitable (and only other!) site and luckily the surprised house owner quickly agreed to let us inflate the balloon from his grass!phew!

Having practiced the rigging a few times now with our new Cuban balloon team, we got inflated within 20 minutes and it was finally time to take Iseult for her first-ever balloon flight.

I must admit I had forgotten how sensitive this tiny thing is and with one burn only we shot up to the skies of Vinales! There is indeed a slight difference between flying a 315 in Burma and our lightweight 56!

Playing with the very light and variable surface winds we hovered for a while over one of the Mogotes and admired the diversity of fauna and flora. There are palm trees and exotic orchids growing on these lime stone hills and we spotted larger birds of prey but also the rare tiny hummingbird - in fact Vinales has a species that only exists here!

We had the plan to do an intermediate landing to change over passengers with Daniel but winds only took me further away from the main road and towards a valley which wasn't accessible by car. Telling Phil and Daniel to get on a horse to come closer to me, sadly didn't work (smile!), so I had to fly on...

I finally decided to risk a climb to 1500ft to get more speed and check directions.

The view around the mountains and out towards the coastline was just breath-taking and out of this world! I found a north-westerly heading at 7kt and stuck with that for a little while until I decided  it would be better to drop down quickly as the next mountain range was approaching quickly. Slowly and with lots of patience we managed to wiggle ourselves towards the famous prehistoric mural painting of Les Dos Hermanas (the two sisters)

After an hour and fifteen minutes - which was certainly the longest ever balloon flight in Cuba - we touched down near a tobacco farm and were promptly invited for freshly brewed coffee and then shown around the tobacco store house. 

The tobacco plants are harvested in January and then hang in these massive drying huts for about 4 months till the rainy season starts in May. they are then processed and part of the revenue goes to the State, part of it is private profit.

It certainly was a flight that both of us will never forget! Some mojitos later on today are certainly called for to celebrate Iseult's first balloon ride!