Some villagers in the Jaipur region, Rajasthan, got a surprise visit on a chilly February morning when two hot air balloons landed on their fields.

I had been on a wonderful ride at sunrise, viewing the landscape and villages from above as the morning activities started. You can read about this in my blog post Up up and away.

But now we were giving rise to great interest as we were landing and the balloon was deflated. Morning chores were interrupted to see what was going on.

As we stepped out of the basket, I thought it would be polite and correct to greet the family elders.

As usual, the children were excited and curious about this unexpected event which brought a hoard of strangers to their farmlands.

One of the teenage girls stepped up to me:

“This is my home, please come and visit”.

What generosity! I really would have loved to visit her home, but unfortunately there was no time since the balloon was almost ready to be transported back to where it had come from and we had to go back to Jaipur.

But there was still some time to say hello to her friends, or maybe they were her sisters or relatives. There was a language barrier although we could exchange some words in English. All girls struck me as being very strong, they seemed to know what they wanted. You can tell just by looking at them, can’t you?

The girl who had invited me to her home gave me her WhatsApp number, and I promised to send her the photos I had taken. But now comes the sad part, of which I’m very much ashamed: sometime, somewhere during the rest of our two weeks in India I lost the (rather big) piece of paper on which she had written her number.

So now I ask: is there anyone reading this who recognises her and can put me in touch with her? If yes, please get in touch with me via my Facebook page so that I can live up to what I promised.