Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/24995
The clear skies above the ancient Mayan city of Palenque are raining gasoline and metal. Five hundred feet above the ruins, a pilot in a one-man, motorized hot-a ir balloon drifts silently by in the direction of a jagged mountain ridge. He moves frantically in his seat, desperately flipping the engine's start switch-trying to re ign ite the motor which, until moments ago, had fil led the air with noise. There had been no engine fa ilure. The pilot had simply kil led the motor, forgoing all powers of control in exchange. for a moment of quiet. The ridge looms ever closer. In a last-min ute attempt to save him se lf, he pitches anything of substance overboard, hoping to regain altitude: more fuel from the engine, lead weights, personal items. The craft's descent eventually slows and, leveling off, it na rrowly avoids the snare of the cliff. Now in the clear, the pilot lowers a rope which will be secured by ground technicians to pull the wayward trave ler back to Earth. On the ground, amidst anxious laughter and cheers, the crew points out to him that he forgot to turn the ignition key back on. For more than eight years, adventurist, thril l-seeker and nature lover Nicolas Hulot has been serving French audiences a delectable digestif to their Saturday evening meals: a late-night TV stew of sticks and rocks and mouthfu lls of brine. Ushuai'a : The Ultimate Adventure goes straight to the head with edgy exploits like this treacherous balloon flyaway. Named for Ushua'ia , the southernmost city in the world which plays gateway to Antarctica, the program is a fou-furieux celebration of the extremes of Mother Nature .and human endurance. Hulot's boyish grins and rugged poses grace the sma ll screen from the Earth's most severe terrain, from thousands of feet in the air and in the company of each continent's fiercest beasts. He swims with sharks near Moorea, gazes down on snoozing liQns in Tanzania and frolics with orangutans in Borneo. He has scaled the Ushuai'a is a mainline of discovery and emotion between the intre- Eiffel Tower sans ropes, raced through violent rapids in Mexico on a slim slip of plas tic and navigated a hot-air balloon out of a treacherous, four-hundred-meter-deep canyon only a few feet wider than the balloon itself. pid Hulot and all of France. With cameras affixed to every hang glider, hot-air balloon and submarine which Hulot pi lots, and microphones which follow him even into the depths of the sea, he ta lks viewers through his own excitement and anxieties as he experiences them first-hand. "You would see him flying in an ultralight," explains a regular view-