Travel: Balloon flight over Luxor

The Star, Canada

The red ball rising from the soil looks much like the early-morning sun creeping over the horizon, except that it's fuelled by what sounds like a giant hissing dragon.

It's hard to tell what's the most incredible part of this daily pre-dawn ritual not far from the shores of the Nile River – the fact that 32 people are about to be lifted into a wicker basket the size of a mini-bus, or that we'll soon be hanging, quite literally, over history.

Scattered in the fields around us are a half-dozen other balloons and they're rising quickly to the heavens. But pilot Bahaa El Din Mohamed Ahmed is not in any rush.

"I love this more than myself," he says, sporting a crisp white shirt, gold-trimmed epaulettes and a tie covered in tiny hot-air balloons. "Every day is different – totally new. You can fly a balloon in America, in Canada, in Kenya, in England and you only see fields, electric wires and houses.

"Here, you see something really unique – thousands of years of civilization."