As the sun came up, light revealed the spectacular dark red colors of the desert. Somebody had warned us how boring it would be to fly over the Sahara, but the reality was quite the opposite. The light was alive, the sand was alive. I spent hours staring at the desert, feeling its strangeness.

Jones, March 4, 10,000 feet over Mauritania
Unlike the main battery of 28 propane cylinders, our four auxiliary tanks had no automatic dropping mechanism, and the only way to release them was to go outside the gondola and cut them free. Hence the need for an EVA, or extravehicular activity. Clearly it must take place over a totally remote area, where the falling tanks couldn't do any damage.

The idea of an EVA was exciting, and as we prepared for it, letting the balloon descend gently to 10,000 feet, our adrenaline was flowing. But when we opened the top hatch and climbed out, we found it was lovely just to sit out in the fresh air on top of the gondola, with the feeling of being completely still. We could look straight down through two miles of air to the sandy wilderness below. Above us the sky was cloudless, and below us an infinity of sand and rock stretched away as far as eye could see. With the burners shut down, there was not the slightest sound to spoil the silence. We'd also descended in order to deice. Some of it was already melting, and water was pouring down off the envelope, but any drips that fell on the surface of the propane tanks froze again immediately, and stalactites ten feet long were still dangling from the skirt, joining it to the gondola. Bertrand attacked the icicles with a fire ax. As he said, it was probably the first time that ice rained on the Sahara in several thousand years.

Fax from ground controller Sue Tatford, March 4
Good morning, boys. Sue here. Latest news on Andy Elson: flight time 15 days 22 hrs 44 mins so far. Alt. 18,000 feet, 19.06 N 112.12, east of Hainan, over South China Sea....

Just received a letter from Uday Saddam Hussein, son of the Iraqi leader. He says, "It is with great pleasure that we can take part in the success of this peaceful flight." He doesn't say you can't cross his country. But he adds, "Sorry we can't ensure the safety of the balloonists."

Jones, March 4, 24,000 feet over Algeria
So far our flight path had not been likely to cause any political difficulties; but now we were heading for Libya, and beyond it Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries, any of which could cause problems. Our gravest concern was about Yemen. Our present track was taking us across a large prohibited zone of the country, outlined in red on the map. Our support team could see that we had little chance of circumnavigating it, and although our meteorologists, Luc Trullemans and Pierre Eckert, did their best to steer us round the edge of it, the wind would barely allow a big enough deviation.

It had never been part of our plan to fly over Yemen, and so we had no diplomatic clearance. This meant that controller Patrick Schelling had to negotiate from scratch. He made numerous calls to the San'a tower, asking for clearance. It took him some time to explain what was happening, because the man on duty had only broken English and kept asking, "What is the balloon's destination?" When Patrick replied, "It's going round the world," he repeated, "What is its destination? If you have flight plan, you must have destination." The man insisted that he himself could not give clearance, because he lacked the authority to do so. All Patrick could do was keep talking to him until he felt fairly sure that nobody was going to do the balloon any harm.

Piccard, March 7, 19,000 feet over Saudi Arabia
At 0230 Greenwich, Brian went to bed, and after a couple of hours I was rewarded by the sight of a magnificent sunrise over the Rub' al Khali desert. But before I had time to marvel at it, an astonishing fax came in from Brian's wife, Jo, informing us that Andy Elson and Colin Prescot, whose electrical systems had failed, were ditching 70 miles off the coast of Japan.

I was afraid for the two crewmen—both good friends of ours—but at the same time I felt immediately that the world's attention was focused on us, because now we were the only ones left in the race.

Two hours later a fax confirmed that the balloon had come down in the sea and that the crew had been rescued. Of course I was desperate to pass on the news to Brian, but I kept to our agreement that neither of us would wake the other unnecessarily, and when eventually he stuck his head out of the bunk curtain, I said, "Brian, I've got the most incredible news. What d'you think it is?"

Instantly he said, "Andy's down."

Piccard, March 8, 16,500 feet over India
Brian and I were together in the cockpit, and we suddenly realized we could see the peaks of the Himalayas, poking up through the clouds away to our left. They were probably 300 miles off, but we were so high that they made a stunning array along the northern horizon. We thought we could identify Everest, because one mountain stood out taller than all the rest around it.