Expedition Africa 2012

Expedition Africa Day 4 - Bundu Bashing

Louise Foulkes (ARWS) / 11.05.2012

Teams were starting to look battered and worn at sunrise this morning. Nearly all teams had stories of navigational errors, thorns and sleep monsters (hallucinations common in adventure racing caused by lack of sleep).

Perhaps the best of these was from Laura de Haast of team Castle Lite. Laura didn’t recognise her team mates or remember what she was doing. She became quite disoriented and paranoid as couldn’t understand why strangers kept following her where ever she walked. She also couldn’t work out why they kept making her climb back and forward over the same fence. Team members explained that in actual fact they had climbed many, many different fences during the night.

As Alex from Red Ant explained, up until the epic trek at the end, everything had been smooth sailing. It was difficult for teams to get their head around the fact that their progress had slowed to a crawl and they could lose hours at a time going up and down to find a trail and have no forward progress.

Teams such as the Penny Pinchers said that, “you would literally get one arm stuck, then one leg stuck and so on until all your limbs were pinned by the thorns. It would get to a point where you couldn’t actually move”. Apparently the South African term for this is “Bundu Bashing”. 

The three teams at the back of the field arrived at the end of the long bike ride to TA 9 within an hour and 45 minutes of each other. Team Pure Adventures was the first of these teams to arrive at the TA. Unfortunately when they went to sign in they discovered that they had lost their passport on the road in the ride. On talking to the race organisers they found out that unless they found it they would be ranked as a “Finisher - Unofficial”.

This was difficult for the team to digest and they spent quite a while trying to work out whether they should ride back or simply give up and pull out of the race. They decided on the former and were remounting their bikes when team Walhalla arrived waiving Pure Adventures passport in the air. They had found it on the edge of the road! 

Both these teams, as well as team Nyamazela, who had arrived in the middle of this were considering sleeping prior to heading out on the paddle. Race Director, Stephen Muller, however encouraged them to continue on, get straight into the paddle then bunk down for a sleep in the TA prior to heading out on the epic trek. From the leaderboard, it appears that all teams took this advice.