Surviving African Snows

Rob / 18.07.2002

As Adventure Quest 2002 draws to a close in South Africa the latest reports read: “Weather conditions are worsening. Due to heavy snow falls teams are taking double the time to complete the last leg, racing in severely adverse conditions with gale force winds and sub zero temperatures.”

who is with the multi-national team ‘International Adventurers’. They live up to their name as the rest of the team are Kristel Dorion of Guatemala and Jody La Par and Andie Tubbs, both of the USA, with SleepMonsters.com member David Ogden, who lives in Cyprus, acting as team manager.

It sounds like they’ve been having a tough time on the 500km course through the Eastern Cape Mountains, starting and finishing in the Mountain Zebra National Park. They failed to make a dark zone cut-off on leg 3, and didn’t get to start the big rafting section. Instead they had to portage their canoes 50Km at night (with the help of mountain bikes) and take a 5 hour penalty as they pushed on to try and avoid a mid-race cut-off.

Then on the second day the weather began to turn (one team pulled out with hypothermia) and Jody La Par developed flu symptoms and by day 3 they’d opted for a shortened course and are pressing on unranked towards the finish in some awful weather. Six of the 23 starters have withdrawn and a further 5, including International Adventurers are unranked. The winners were Team Edge (Michelle Lombardi, Phillip Swanepoel, Mark Collins and John Collins) who got round the course in 78 hours 32 minutes. They were well ahead of anyone else and won a place next year’s World Championships as this is one of the qualifying races.

We hope to have a full report from David on the adventures of the ‘internationals’ in the near future.