There are some of the other adventures, by the way.
Five times around the world and to the North Pole and then also ballooning across Australia.
Very impressive, very impressive.
Yep, that's the balloon, and then ballooning from New Zealand to Australia against the wind.
That was my most risky adventure.
Because if anything goes wrong, we would have ended up curving down and ending up in Antarctica.
It's hard to get out of Antarctica in winter time.
What's this here? What's this here? Is this landing on the coast?
Yeah, that's the balloon. So what had happened was...
John Singleton, most people know Singo... he-- I was going to fly from Australia to
New Zealand.
So here you are, Australia to New Zealand.
And because the winds that balloons fly are always westerly winds, because the jet stream.
They go from the west to east all the way around the world.
Well Singo bet me.
He said, ‘I bet you 100 grand you can't go from New Zealand to Australia.’
And I said, ‘Of course you can't, it's opposite.’ You can't go against the wind.
But then I checked with the Met Bureau, and they said, ‘Dick, if there was a high pressure
system that was down low...’
Let's quickly walk along here.
They said, ‘Dick, if there was a high pressure system that's anti-clockwise.
You might just be able to take off from New Zealand, and if you can go very low.’
And I said I'll just skim the waves.
And so what happened was, we took off from here.
And at first we started going to the East towards South America.
But then, as you'll notice, we started to curve, and we came around here.
This was about 40 hours.
I think we spent the first night here.
We just missed Norfolk Island. Didn't see it.
Then as we got here, we started to curve down, and we would have ended up down the coast
in Antarctica.
So I got a fishing boat.
I knew I'd be criticized if I got Search and Rescue to come out if we dropped into the ocean.
So we got a fishing boat out.
But then we found out the wind at 8,000 feet was more Easterly, so we climbed up, and we
caught the wind in.
And can you believe it, we dropped the gondola down into the surf, and this is the beach
just south of Surfers Paradise.
And we ran the gondola in and landed on the beach.
So we'd done the first and only flight from New Zealand to Australia.
First crossing of the Tasman by balloon.
Very lucky.
And by the way, this is sitting on-- I didn't like the balloon gondola.
It was enclosed; it was designed to float.
So I made this little veranda up, and then I had a sundeck seat.
So I would sit up here, and when we came across Australia, we were at 20,000 feet.
And so you could sit here.
You wouldn't want to let go; I was holding on if you notice.
Yeah.
And it's 20,000 feet.
Imagine this, we were doing 160 kph in the jetstream.
160 kilometres an hour?
But you sit there completely still.
There was no noise, no movement.
160 kph.
How does that work?
It's just the speed of the jetstream.
You're IN the air.
You're in the air, so you're just moving at the speed of air.
We were probably about maybe 20,000 feet or so, and it's a wonderful way to travel.
This was my control system.
Back in those days, we had the ham radio for doing communication and everything.
And there wasn't satellite telephones or anything like that, but I did have one of the early
Garmin GPSes, so at least we knew where we were.
And we had a few snacks on board.
Yeah, a bit of Dick Smith food. Very important.
Very important.
And that's some of the flights I've done.
Five flights.
And you'll be interested, the yellow one right across Russia, Siberia and Mongolia, that
was 4-wheel drive.
I did it in an F550.
There it is. Is there a picture of it?
There it is.
And so I bought this in America and then drove it from Anchoridge in Alaska to New York.
Shipped it to England and then right across Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan.
Broke down in Mongolia in the Gobi Desert, and then eventually right through to Siberia.
And then across Japan, that only took 7 hours.
Then we shipped it to Perth, and then across Australia just via the easy road.
And then shipped it back to Los Angeles and then back to...
So you've done a bit of 4-wheel driving?
Yeah, a little bit. Like around the world.
Yeah, see across there, look.
So it was about 50,000 kilometres of driving.
It was about the same distance around the equator and had a wonderful time.
Now this is interesting.
Here we are at the Opera House.
My wife Pip and myself, and this said "Australians driving around the world" because we drove
right across Russia.
And everywhere we went, we had friendly people.
So we had this because you keep getting stopped by the police all the time.
And we don't know what they're stopping us for, because we don't speak Russian.
But we'd point to this: Australians driving around the world.
And there was a map, and they'd give us a big smile, and off we'd go.