Over The Canterbury Plains

The sun rises hours after our departure from Christchurch. In the middle of the Canterbury Plains, New Zealand’s oldest farmland, we help inflate the colourful envelope of a hot air balloon. Two motorised fans and the burner make a hell of a racket. Then everything happens quickly. We climb into the basket and slowly rise into the air in silence.

Grisu hisses from time to time. The sun rises and casts long shadows behind the rows of trees. The New Zealand Alps rise up in the distance. We are lucky. According to the captain, this is the best day for a long time. For us, it’s by far the best visibility in the last six weeks. A sheep bleats. A cow complains. A hare flees from our shadow. Silence.

The entire Canterbury Plains are extensively farmed. Irrigation rotors several hundred metres long paint green circles in the beige landscape. The circles provide only one thing: grass for the massive increase in the number of cattle in recent years. The world’s largest milk refinery appears on the horizon. Sheep could cope with the sparse greenery, cows could not. But the Chinese demand for dairy products is rising in line with their standard of living.

On the one hand, this means that dairy product prices in New Zealand remain two to four times higher than in Germany. On the other hand, the Kiwis obviously don’t know what to do with all the discarded cows. New Zealand beef is cheap and excellent. We eat a large steak at least every fourth day at prices well below the cheapest discount turkey at home.

Ballooning has been considered an extreme sport in New Zealand for a few weeks now. A worse captain than ours made a pretty exciting landing. To be more precise: a highly exciting one in the power line. Five passengers died. The government safety regulations were drastically tightened shortly afterwards. Our captain landed much better: over the power line directly into the cow pasture and then a clean 100 metre long drag strip. Touchdown.