This was one story that neither Neville and I really fancied, especially compared with the last two.
Anyway we were to head down to Bombay to meet up with yet another journo - Dave ‘Biffa’ Bowden for a story about a Indian Billionare - Vijay Singhania who was going to attempt to set the world altitude record in a balloon which had stood for 17 years at 65,000ft.
Why, well Biffa had managed to wangle a free flight for him and free accommodation for all of us.
The rooms were at Vijay’s factory guesthouse 20 miles outside Bombay. The picture actually makes it look very nice.
Again poor Neville had to share, with me this time unfortunately. We had to keep a room for Dave who was flying in later that night. Richard Branson this man wasn’t.
It turned out to be a couple of easy days however, with the odd good meal thrown in. Am I not allowed to think of my stomach - I just don’t know when or where my next meal may be!!
The day of the flight was a long one - we had to get up at 2.00am to get to the sight and wait for the ballon to be inflated - which was big - 1.5million litres or so.
Eventually it did go up to the patriotic rhetoric of the announcer which wants to make you cry with laughter, throw up and throttle him all at the same time.
In the end he set a new world record of around 68,000ft and most stunning of all instead of coming back to earth gently decided that was enough, and basically pulled the plug. He came down in the same time he went up - which was quick!
We then spent hours and hours waiting for him to be collected and brought back. It would have been OK but as we were at Bombay racecourse we had to put up with race commentary from somewhere else in the world, over the tannoy system. Very hard for even me to sleep through. And to make it worse he flew over the racecourse, didn’t stop but flew on to a temple - and then came back.
Dave doing a ‘He did it live", with him no where to be seen.
It was a nice easy job to finish the year on though.
