The only was is Up when you're tied to that many balloons. Photo / Tom Morgan, The Adventurists
The only was is Up when you're tied to that many balloons. Photo / Tom Morgan, The Adventurists
A British adventurer has flown 2500m above South Africa attached to 100 helium balloons in a scene reminiscent from Pixar's much-loved film Up.
The elderly widower in the hit computer-animation comedy attached his entire house to colourful balloons, but Tom Morgan had only a camping chair for his ambitious balloon trip.
The Bristol daredevil travelled 24km attached to the balloons, which his team spent two days inflating, after bad weather forced them to move the attempt from Botswana to near Johannesburg.
He told the Telegraph: "It was a fairly indescribable feeling, wafting across Africa on a cheap camping chair dangling from a load of balloons. Sort of peaceful and terrifying in equal measure.
"I came here to see if we could organise the world's most ridiculous air race and after that flight, I'm more convinced than ever that we can."
The 38-year-old, who founded The Adventurists organisation in 2004, says: "We hold what we like to think are proper adventures, the sort where you have to use your own cunning; no guides, no rules and plenty of glorious mayhem."
The Adventurists say they are "fighting to make the world less boring" and their adventures have so far included rickshaw driving across the Himalayas and motorbiking across a frozen Siberian lake.
Fellow explorer Matt Dickens explains Morgan created The Adventurists after "a failed attempt to drive to Mongolia in 2003".
"He decided to try again the following year with slightly more planning than just getting drunk in a bar and pointing towards the most ridiculous place he could think of on a map," he said.
"Since then we've been putting on a series of events and have had tens of thousands of people participate in our adventures."
So why the balloon flight? "Whyever not?" he responds. "Surely it's perfectly logical?"
