Saga and the Balloon Fiesta
Every autumn a hundred balloons lift off one riverbed at first light. It is the largest ballooning event in Asia, and it is a real place you can fly to.
AT A GLANCE
- Event
- Saga International Balloon Fiesta, held on the Kase river flats
- When
- Late autumn, over about five days
- Scale
- Around 100 balloons, launching together at dawn
- Setting
- A flat river plain between the Sefuri mountains and the Ariake Sea
Ballooning in Japan has a capital, and it is a riverbed in Saga.
Every autumn the Kase river flats fill up before dawn with crews unrolling envelopes in the dark, and shortly after first light around a hundred balloons go up more or less together. It is the largest event of its kind in Asia, it has been running for decades, and the reason it is here is the reason any balloon event is anywhere: the local weather cooperates.
Why here
The Saga plain is flat, open and bounded — mountains to the north, the Ariake Sea to the south — which gives it exactly what competition ballooning needs: light, layered morning winds that go different directions at different heights. Pilots use that to steer, because it is the only steering there is.
Competitive ballooning is a game of dropping a small marker as close as possible to a target on the ground, having got there using nothing but choice of altitude. Everything the sport is about is the thing this game is about.
Flying to it
Saga is a long way from most places, which is the point. Getting a balloon to Kyushu is a journey of days, and arriving in the right week is a matter of having started early enough and read the right winds on the way.
The plain itself is generous once you are there: flat, wide, plenty of ground to put down on, and a horizon with the Sefuri range on one side and the enormous tidal flats of the Ariake Sea on the other — which at low tide are a landscape of their own, kilometres of grey silt drawn with drainage channels.
Screenshots are from a build in progress and are not necessarily taken at the place described.
Terrain is built from elevation data published by the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI).