Southern Traverse
The Course in Detail
Susan McKenzie / 14.11.2004
The race will be officially started by the Queen’s representative in New Zealand, Governor-General Dame Silvia Cartwright. “And it’s starting on time, right at nine o’clock,� Hunt says. “If a team isn’t there, they can catch up.�
It’s a ceremonial start, in fact, as a police car leads the teams on their cycle out of town and inland.
“They’ll probably start to spread out rather quickly, because the biking section gets steep very quickly,� says Hunt. “It’s a bit of bike push to CP1, then a really big downhill along a road that has lots of big boulders. We’re putting an ambulance at the bottom of the hill. Because there are bound to be one or two falling off their bikes on the way down.�
Hunt describes the next part of this first 56-kilometre bike leg as “fast and furious.�
“We went screaming along this section, so expect to see teams going down ‘zip, zip, zip.�
The top teams are expected to finish the first bike leg in about four hours. Stage Two of the race is one of the longest trekking sections of the course, a 14-22 hour trek along the Bald and Kelly Ranges that will separate the best from the rest.
Hunt doesn’t put many sections out of bounds to racers, but in this section the lowland of the Taipo Valley is off-limits. “I enjoyed the ridge top so much I decided to make them all do it,� he says with a laugh. This is where teams will find that monkey scrub and another area Hunt’s literary mind calls the Doctor Seuss forest.
After dark, the area can be quite tricky, with big slip faces which teams have to be careful to spot and avoid. Teams then have a bike ride into the put-in for the first paddling section at Lake Haupiri. This 67-kilometre paddle winds from Lake Haupiri to the Haupiri River to the Ahaura River to Grey River, through interwoven braided rivers into an impressive gorge. It’s what Hunt calls one of the “gems� of the course.
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