Southern Traverse
Iconic New Zealand Race Draws to a Close
Susan McKenzie / 19.11.2004
The beachfront outside the Southland Hotel provided the ideal finish line on a hot, sunny day. The nearby Tasman View had a great balcony overlooking the finish, as it offered an all-day snack menu for staff, volunteers, fans and supporters, and the soft sand provided a bed for more than a few dozy people. There should be quite a few sunburned necks and noses at the Awards Ceremony this evening.
Teams racing on both the classic and the adventure courses came across the finish line most of the day, after completing the final 22-kilometre trek down the beach along the Tasman Sea.
“The walk down the beach was rather long, I think we got the picture after about twelve kilometres,� admitted Kiwi Rachel Barton of Sierra International, whose team crossed the finish line around 10pm in fifth place overall. “We were amusing ourselves by looking at the different logs and pieces of driftwood and telling each other what we imagined them to be.�
“We realised today that basically we’ve been cold this whole race,� Barton observed, likely speaking for all the competitors at this year’s Southern Traverse (and probably a good many officials, too.) “It was good in a sense, though, because being cold like that really seemed to keep us awake, and eliminate the hallucinations that we usually have.
Barton’s team was one of three teams that offered help mid-course when the Swedish team Lundhags Adventure got into difficulty. Sierra, Outward Bound and Mainly Tramping all tried to reach the Swedes after Mikael Andersson fell into a creek and developed hypothermia.
“We were so disappointed to learn it was them,� she said, “We’d been racing a lot together, especially pushing through some of that scrub. We had some pretty interesting discussions up there, I must say.�
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