Montgomery residents tour Myanmar in a balloon
By:Helen Pettigrew
Montgomery Township residents Uli and Shirley Krahenbuhl go to great lengths to plan trips to unusual destinations and then fly over them in a hot air balloon.
This takes a bit of organizing as the balloon and its basket, burner and fuel tanks, which together weigh more than 200 pounds, must be shipped air-freight to arrive at the foreign destination before the Krahenbuhls arrive. The whole package is about 4-feet square, Mr. Krahenbuhl said.
Their most recent trip, in February, was to Myanmar, once known as Burma. It involved 28 people and six hot air balloons, according to Mr. Krahenbuhl. Accompanying them on the Burma trip was Bertrand Piccard, who recently became the first person to travel around the world in a hot air balloon.
The main purpose of the trip, Mr. Krahenbuhl said, was to combine experiencing the culture with ballooning. The hot air balloon allows the travelers to see sights and have experiences that other tourists might miss. This was the Krahenbuhls’ second hot air balloon trip to Myanmar.
"The main reason I went again is because the weather is so fantastic over there," Mr. Krahenbuhl said.
Myanmar was chosen because its weather is perfect for ballooning and because it is a country that is not easily accessible. "It was beautiful with all of the pagodas and temples and stupas."
A stupa is a pile of brick on top of a pagoda, built up to 30 feet high to honor Buddha.
"The first time we got up in the balloon, it was early in the morning and it looked like literally hundreds and hundreds of monuments out there. The whole landscape was dotted with them," Mr. Krahenbuhl said. "They claim there are 3,000 (temples and pagodas) and that they are the remains from about 8,000."
Myanmar has very little tourism and, until recently, was closed to outsiders. The communist military regime that has been ruling the country since it took over in a coup opened Myanmar to tourists about five years ago, Mr. Krahenbuhl said.
Although part of the country is occupied by rebel forces, the Krahenbuhls said they did not worry about this. They did not enter rebel territory, located in jungles in the northern part of the country.
Entry to the country requires a visa, which allows a 25-day stay in Myanmar. A Burmese acquaintance helped arrange the trip and helped the group got the correct visas, according to Mr. Krahenbuhl.
"We had to get permission because there have not been other foreign balloonists allowed to fly in there," Mr. Krahenbuhl said.
"We were very welcomed by the regime," Mr. Krahenbuhl added. "It took three months to prepare. We had to get permission from their equivalent of the [Federal Aviation Administration] and department of tourism."
Some members of the Myanmar aviation administration had never seen a hot air balloon before, Mr. Krahenbuhl said, so he and some of the pilots had to explain how they work they even took one administration official for a demonstration ride.
"It was logistically quite an undertaking," Mr. Krahenbuhl said of the trip.
Not only did they have to ship six balloons and baskets to Burma, but once there, had to obtain propane to fuel the balloons. This was especially difficult because there is only one refinery in the country that makes it, Mr. Krahenbuhl said.
"We filled the propane into big tanks like houses here have for heating, and then filled the tanks for the balloons from them," Mr. Krahenbuhl said.
Local relieving crews to chase after the airborne balloons and collect the passengers after landing also had to be hired.
Once the Krahenbuhls and all their equipment had arrived, their travels introduced them to a culture virtually unknown to most Americans.
"We always say, with a balloon, you don’t visit a country through the front door, you come through the back doors," Mr. Krahenbuhl said.
The Krahenbuhls and the 26 other ballooners visited four cities in Burma, Inle Lake, Mandalay, Monywa and Bagan which were all very different culturally, the Krahenbuhls said.
"In one town Bagan there have been a lot of balloons, but in two cities we have been the first hot air balloon," Mr. Krahenbuhl said. "In Inle Lake, when we landed, people came up to my wife. They thought we were from another world."
"I got the feeling in one area that the people had never really seen a white person before because they were touching my skin," Ms. Krahenbuhl said. "It was so funny and so unusual, that these little kids and women would want to touch my face."
"Some people were a little bit afraid, but they laughed and were excited," she said of seeing the balloon. "They liked to chase it around and see where it would land especially the children."
Although steering a hot air balloon to the ground is not an exact science, most of the landings went well, they said, and the Burmese were always friendly and happy to see them.
"You never know where you’re going to land," Ms. Krahenbuhl said. "We always had interesting landings."
On one trip, she said, "We took gondola-type boats, and took the baskets in those boats to the end of a lake, which took an hour and a half, and we launched with the idea that the wind would bring us back to where we started. This year most of us made it back to where we started, but last year my husband and I were going into the hills.
"We tried to land in a clearing," she continued, "but we landed in a tree, and all of a sudden there was this big group of people with machetes and they were hacking down the tree, and when they were cutting it all these red ants were going down my back."
It turned out that the people were just trying to help them out of the tree. They helped the Krahenbuhls carry the balloon out.
Sometimes they thought there was no one around when they landed, and then people would run out of the bushes. Crowds would be there to help carry the balloon to the road where the truck would come.
But for Ms. Krahenbuhl, the most interesting part of the trip was learning about a culture and a country that is virtually unknown to Westerners. Only about three people can fit into a balloon basket, so while some went ballooning, the others traveled around the countryside.
The Krahenbuhls’ trips involved stops at schools and temples. They talked with Buddhist monks and visited tattoo parlors, where the Burmese get tattoos for good luck, or to ward off catastrophes.
"For me it was just so fascinating because it was so different," she said. "It’s the people, it’s the countryside itself, it’s the smells and the way they cook."
Food in Myanmar is a combination of Thai, Chinese, Indian and Burmese cuisines, she said, and it consisted of noodles, rice, vegetables, curries, soups, fish and a little meat usually duck or chicken.
"So we ate very different things every night," Ms. Krahenbuhl said.
"The people were living perfectly fine without electricity and running water, and I think that was the most fascinating thing for me to see another culture that is so different from Western culture that is surviving, and surviving so well," Ms. Krahenbuhl said.
"Even in the farms you never see a piece of machinery," she added.
Ms. Krahenbuhl attended a festival for the full moon where the carnival rides were operated manually. "Humans were pushing the Ferris wheel around," she said.
Not every child goes to school, Mr. Krahenbuhl noted. "We visited some schools. They were very, very primitive schools just one bench with no books."
According to Mr. Krahenbuhl, the Burmese produce most of their own food, and spend much of the day in the fields farming it.
"There is no electricity so when it gets dark they go to bed and when it is light they get up again," he said. "They spend a fair amount of time practicing their Buddhism."
Most of the population is Buddhist, he said, and every male age 6 and up must enter the monastery for at least one year. Upon entry to the monastery the boy’s head is shaved and he is issued a red-brown robe and one pot for food. He uses the pot to beg for food, Mr. Krahenbuhl said. "He gets himself used to living with the minimal amount he needs for that time, so when he comes out he has learned modesty."
And although the country is very poor, its people put a lot of effort into building temples and pagodas to honor Buddha, some of which are covered in gold leaf. The temples are held in high regard throughout Myanmar, and the international community has donated money to repair some that have fallen to ruin.
"You always need to take your shoes off when you go in," Mr. Krahenbuhl said of the monuments. "Some of them have paintings and most have Buddha statues and pictures."
"Its’ very similar to going into a church in Europe a middle-age church or something like that," he said.
The Krahenbuhls went to a factory where people were hammering out gold leaves by hand. Packages of gold leaves were sold in stores for people to decorate religious spaces, Mr. Krahenbuhl said. A package of 10 leaves costs about 50 cents because they are so thin, and banana is used as the glue to adhere them to the walls.
The Burmese people have a very different outlook on life because of the influences of their religion.
"The Buddhist philosophy is that what they do in this life will affect them in the next life, so they are very polite," Ms. Krahenbuhl said. "If the crowd is pushing and shoving, one elder in the group will say stop, and they do. You can put your bag down and no one will touch it."
Mr. Krahenbuhl, who is a recreational hot air balloon pilot, said he first learned his craft at work, at the Switzerland-based company Blaser Swisslube. Mr. Krahenbuhl is the president of the Goshen, N.Y., branch.
The company sells cutting fluids for machine shops, but uses hot air ballooning as a team building skill for its employees.
The trip to Myanmar included 16 balloon flights, and the ballooners also took up members of their Burmese ground crew, hotel staff and others.
The Krahenbuhls have been on ballooning trips to Switzerland, Italy, Portugal and all over the United States.
Mr. Krahenbuhl’s next ballooning trip will be to Portugal, but he can be seen flying over Montgomery Township in his balloon on weekends.