It is 6.30am when the first rays of tropical sun catch the scarlet and gold fabric of the hot-air balloon, Koala. Suddenly, the Australian morning lights up. We're wafting silently 750 metres above neat fields of tobacco and maize, orchards of mango and lychee. Below are the fertile plains of the Atherton Tablelands and a lazy morning breeze seems to be steering us towards the virgin rainforest of Australia's Great Dividing Range.
'No worries,' says Clive. He's the relaxed chief pilot of Hot Air, the pioneering balloon company that takes tourists for dawn sails in the skies above tropical North Queensland. He tugs a lever and a roaring jet of flame spurts like a dragon's breath into the balloon. We ease higher, through a misty cloud.
With me on vast balloons sailing gently through the dawn were nine young Hong Kongers who had won a student ecological contest. Here, they were getting a kookaburra's-eye view of how agriculture, industry and tourism can flourish without overwhelming nature. It was an education they could never gain in the classroom.
You start the hot-air adventure at 4.30am when a minibus picks you up at your Cairns hotel. By 6pm, you are on the Atherton Tablelands, a rolling area of high downs 600 metres above sea level.
Light is just breaking in the mild winter morning as the crew starts firing life into the sleeping giants. The colourful material of the balloons is spread on the ground, their mouths gaping open as jets of burning gas are directed inside. As the hot air collects inside the tough fabric - half-canvas, half-plastic, by the feel, and said to be five times tougher than other balloon skins - the monsters gradually take shape.
When fully inflated with 9,840 cubic metres of hot air, Koala wafts as tall as a 10-storey building. The beaming grin on this balloon - the largest in Australia - stretches 40 metres from ear to ear.
