Saga International Balloon Fiesta

Every autumn, the plains along the Kase River west of Saga City fill with colour as around a hundred hot-air balloons rise together against the dawn sky. The Saga International Balloon Fiesta is the largest hot-air balloon event in Asia — a five-day competition and festival that draws top pilots from around the world and hundreds of thousands of spectators.

It began modestly. In 1978 a handful of balloons gathered for a small event in Fukuoka, moving to Saga in 1980 for the wide riverbanks and favourable winds that make the area one of Japan's finest flying grounds. Saga has since hosted the Hot Air Balloon World Championship three times, and its main title, the Pacific Cup, now brings some 80-plus balloons to compete over the festival's five days.

At its heart, ballooning is a subtle sport. A pilot can only make a balloon rise or fall – there's no steering – so to reach a target they must read the layered winds overhead, each blowing a different direction at a different height, and climb or drop into the one that carries them where they want to go. Over the Saga plains, where those wind layers are especially complex, it takes real skill. In competition, pilots drop small markers as close as they can to a target; the nearest wins. Because it all depends on the weather, the day's tasks are decided at a pilots' briefing right before each flight – so whether balloons fly, and what they do, is never fixed in advance.

The competition flies twice daily, around dawn and late afternoon, but the fiesta is built for spectators too. Balloon Fantasia sends up giant animal- and character-shaped balloons that delight children each morning. On the final evenings, La Montgolfier Nocturne fills the darkened riverbank with balloons glowing from within as their burners fire in time to music – named for the Montgolfier brothers, who launched the world's first hot-air balloon in 1783. The festival closes with the Key Grab Race, in which pilots skim the ground trying to snatch a model key from atop a tall pole – a finale as tense as it is spectacular.

There's plenty on the ground as well: a hands-on balloon school where visitors help inflate and raise a balloon, a Honda trial-bike stunt show, live stages, and the Umakamon Ichiba market piled with Saga's mountain and sea produce. To handle the crowds, the railway even opens a temporary station, Balloon Saga, for the duration – a five-minute hop from Saga Station.