Amazing Journey of Alice's Balloon

A helium balloon released at a school fête on a rainy day in Manchester has been found in southern China.

After a 6,000-mile journey that has meteorologists baffled, the shrivelled remains were found by Xie Yufei in a park in Guangzhou, a sprawling metropolis 75 miles north of Hong Kong.

The latex balloon had been released on July 15 by Alice Maines, 4, and was one of 100 launched in a balloon race at Flixton Junior School’s annual summer fair. Each one of the balloons, sold for £1, carried a numbered ticket promising the finder a prize: a visit to Chester Zoo.

Sue Wood, secretary of the school’s parent teacher association, said: “We were struggling to launch them for most of the day. At 3pm there was a five-minute window where it wasn’t raining, so we all ran outside, did a countdown and launched them together.”
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