Vernon Kruger, a 52-year-old man from Dullstroom, a small town in South Africa, hasn’t set foot on the ground in 73 days, ever since he climbed into his “home in the sky”, a small barrel at the top of a 25-meter-tall pole.
The first time Kruger climbed into his now famous barrel was 22 years ago, as a dare. He was on a an exotic island, during a vacation, when one of his friends said ‘why don’t you break the record for sitting in a tree?’. It was a joke at first, than it became a dare, so Vernon started looking into it. He learned that an Indonesian man had already broken the record by sitting in a tree for 28 days, but instead of letting it go, his friends suggested he try pole sitting instead. The record stood at 54 days at the time, so the South African set up his own pole and stood on it for 64 days. That was in 1997, and since no one managed to break his world record since, he decided to do it himself.
