Hot Air Balloon Rides in Melbourne & the Yarra Valley
Two rides here, both at dawn: 371 EUR over the centre of Melbourne, 304 EUR over the Yarra Valley vineyards an hour east, transfer included.
Victoria puts two balloon flights on this site and they could hardly be less alike. One crosses the middle of Melbourne at 371 EUR, the higher price of the two and the rarer permission: very few cities anywhere let balloons over the central business district. The other, at 304 EUR, works the Yarra Valley, Victoria's wine country about an hour east, and comes with a transfer. Both go up at first light, because that is the only window the air allows.
Melbourne City Balloon Flight at Sunrise, with Optional Breakfast
Melbourne is the largest city in the world with regular balloon flights over the centre. From a few hundred metres up you hear the first trams starting.
Melbourne City Sunrise Balloon Flight over the Skyline, with GoPro Photos
No other major city in the world can be flown by balloon: Melbourne is the exception, and this one puts the CBD underneath rather than in the distance.
Melbourne Hot Air Balloon Flight over the City at Sunrise
A dawn balloon flight over Melbourne, one of the few cities that allows it above the CBD. About an hour in the air, optional breakfast after.
Melbourne Premium Balloon Flight over the City at Dawn
The premium flight without breakfast: a wicker basket over Melbourne at dawn, the city rearranging itself as the wind turns you. Meeting at the Grand Hyatt.
Melbourne Premium Balloon Flight with Five-Star Champagne Breakfast
The wind decides which part of a city of four million you cross, so no two mornings are alike. A five-star champagne breakfast once the balloon is down.
Yarra Valley Balloon Flight from Chateau Yering, with Optional Breakfast
An hour over the Yarra wineries with the Melbourne skyline on one horizon and the Great Dividing Range on the other. Free parking at Chateau Yering.
Yarra Valley Balloon Flight with Breakfast and Melbourne Pickup
Liberty picks the launch site each morning by wind direction, so nobody knows it in advance. Minibus from Russell Court, continental breakfast at Rochford.
Yarra Valley Morning Hot Air Balloon Flight with Transfer
A dawn balloon flight over the Yarra Valley vineyards, an hour east of Melbourne. Roughly 60 minutes airborne, transfer included, breakfast optional.
Yarra Valley Sunrise Balloon Flight over the Vineyards, with GoPro Photos
Pilots who live in the Yarra Valley, where reading local wind is a skill of its own. Vineyards, 1830s towns and winding rivers below. GoPro photos included.
Yarra Valley Sunrise Balloon Flight with Breakfast at Rochford Wines
Check-in at Rochford Wines with mist still in the low ground and the Yarra bending through it. Flying this early leaves the rest of the day for cellar doors.
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When to fly over Melbourne and the Yarra Valley
Victoria's season peaks when Europe's is shut. December to March is the southern summer: stable mornings over the Yarra Valley, and the window in which the flight across central Melbourne — one of very few city-centre balloon flights permitted anywhere in the world — runs most often.
Winter is not the dead season it would be in the northern hemisphere, but June to August brings the fog and the frontal weather that scrub mornings, and the CBD flight is the first to go when the forecast turns. If Melbourne itself is the reason you are booking, come in the summer.
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The same reading for all 31 destinations, grouped by climate, is on the season guide.
Over the city, and over the vines
The Melbourne flight is worth understanding for what it is. A balloon cannot be steered in the ordinary sense, so a city crossing depends on the wind pointing the right way on the morning you happen to be booked. When it does, you pass over the tower blocks and the bends of the Yarra with the streets still mostly empty underneath. When it does not, the balloon goes wherever the air will take it. Breakfast afterwards is an optional extra rather than part of the ticket. The Yarra Valley gives you a completely different morning. Cold air drains onto the valley floor overnight and settles there, so the first thing you see from the basket is fog in the low ground with vine rows and gum trees pushing up through it. The valley is grazing country as much as vineyard, and the ridges hold the light long before the floor does.
Booking two very different mornings
Australian ballooning runs year round in most regions and Victoria is no exception, though the winter fog that makes the valley photographs also makes for a genuinely cold basket, so the best time to fly and what to wear pages both earn their keep here. Whichever you book, the flight sits inside a much longer morning: meeting in the dark, the drive to the launch field, inflation, the air time, then the retrieve. Crews normally invite passengers to help drag the envelope out and hold it open while the fans run, and that part is more interesting than it sounds. Once you leave the ground the pilot's only real control is height, which is the whole subject of how pilots steer. Marginal weather scrubs a flight rather than shortening it. Age, height and mobility limits vary between operators and the who can fly page sets out the usual ones. If a glass appears once you are back on the ground, the tradition behind it is older than it looks.