Billions of balloons. Albuquerque, New Mexico.

I wasn’t really all that sure where to go after New Orleans. I’d already booked my stay in Austin and Dallas for the end of the week to coincide with a flight to LA but was now faced with a few day’s worth of time to kill. Houston and San Antonio weren’t really inspiring me so I kept looking west, past the great state of Texas and into the state of New Mexico and it’s capital Albuquerque. Perfect place for a day trip (quite literally a day trip, it was a 27 hour bus journey to get there). I awoke on the Greyhound bus just as we were leaving the featureless Texas landscape and heading into the deserts of New Mexico. The brown Texas earth slowly turned to red and the Texan bushes and trees were replaced with cacti and tumbleweeds. This is the real wild west right here.

The ground was still pretty flat, stretching out for hundreds of miles in every direction. Gradually though, shadows appear in the west that begin to rise up out of the desert. As the bus gets closer I realise they’re mountains, the southern tip of the Rockies, beneath which sits the city of Albuquerque.

Albuquerque is another city that I wish i’d had more time in. It’s really quite different from the other metropolises i’d previously visited. Being in New Mexico, the city is, as you would expect, very hispanic. ‘Old Town’ is full of quaint little buildings in the traditional Mexican adobe architecture style. You’ll also find mariachi bands dressed in their traditional Mexican costumes serenading the crowds and there are plenty of opportunities to pick up a sombrero or food-wise, a burrito or enchilada.

Albuquerque is also surrounded by Indian reservations and as a result there is a sizeable Native American population in the city. You can also go on tours up into the mountains to see the ancient petroglyphs that natives carved into the rock thousands of years ago and stock up on Native American jewelry and moccasins.

Now it just so happened that I waltzed into Albuquerque during the week-long International Balloon Fiesta held on the outskirts of the city. I wasn’t originally planning to go see the balloons as it was out on the edge of town and to see it would involve getting up early. I’m not a morning person. Thankfully I met a more ambitious traveller than myself at the hostel, Joe, who was from Cheltenham of all places. This, together with our shared love of ‘The Onion’ (best website on, well, the web – www.theonion.com ) and ‘Peep Show’ meant we got on pretty well. Joe was keen to see the balloons and did some research into what public transport to take, drew a little map and worked out what time we’d have to leave in the morning. I helpfully sat around eating a pie i’d heated up.

The planning done I decided to stop being a wuss, man up and go see some muthafuckin’ balloons. How many times are you going to be in Albuquerque when the world’s premier balloon festival is on? Probably not all that many is the answer.

Balloon folk are morning people it would seem because the day’s ballooning festivities started at 5:45am. We get up at 4:30, catch an empty train to the middle of nowhere, wander down some dark Albuquerque roads and make it to the festival site in time for a breakfast burrito and flavorless coffee.

The field was just a sea of trucks with balloon trailers, but, like the mountains rising up over the desert, the view of the horizon was soon obscured by the silhouettes of hundreds of balloons inflating all over the park. The need for darkness now became clear. The flashes of flame from the burners illuminated the canvas to show whichever design was on the balloon. Against the dark desert backdrop it was quite a sight to behold and my camera now contains 385926359 balloon photos to sift through on my return.

Pretty soon there were hundreds of balloons taking off from every angle. You were free to wander around so could stand right up next to them as they inflated and took off. This was a good thing, desert nights are pretty cold, but an inflating balloon makes for a pretty good patio heater if you stand by it.

Hundreds of balloons flying over the desert is one of the most spectacular things i’ve seen and I would imagine that it looked even more amazing from up in the air, flying amongst them. For some reason some of the balloons chose to land in the city itself, including one on a building site, one in a chemical plant and even one on the railway where we were waiting for our train back. These are probably not high up on the list of ‘best places to land your balloon’.

Whilst waiting for my next Greyhound bus I took some time out to visit the Museum of Nuclear Science and History. The museum is in Albuquerque as it was here where much of the atomic bomb design and testing was done. It was all fairly interesting. Did you know that Brazil nuts contain 1000 times more radiation that the next most radioactive type of food. Think about that one when you tuck into your Christmas nuts.

It was a shame to leave Albuquerque so soon, I hope to return to New Mexico again someday as a balloon pilot. I was now heading to Austin, Texas, ‘live music capital of the world’. This time it was only a 22 hour bus journey so that’s one plus point.