Eco-Challenge
News and No News from Fiji
Keith Byrne – 10.00pm Wednesday Oct. 9th. / 09.10.2002
Well, we’ve done all the checking and testing and just had the most amazing reception dinner with a torchlit team procession and some lots of tribal dancing. It was pretty spectacular. We’ve heard the word from Mark Burnett too and found out very little, they’re treating us like mushrooms – keeping us in the dark and feeding us fertiliser!
The gear testing today was quick and very simple - all very low key. It was just basic rope work really, there was no need to demonstrate self-rescue techniques in the boats or anything like that. They checked our certificates and told us it was down to us to look after ourselves and use our survival skills.
It was a theme Mark Burnett followed up in his talk. He said there had been some soul searching after New Zealand and they thought there was not enough adventure so now the onus is on the teams and we can expect PC’s to be at least 50km apart, so long endurance stages with route choice critical. He warned us all there would be no chance of ‘winging it’ – he’s taking a gamble on a throwback to the old days of expedition racing. Nav will be critical so it’s hard to say who will do well – he got a laugh when he said as it was an island those who got lost would eventually hit the coast the other side.
For the ‘rookies’ it must be intimidating – he was going on about us visiting places even the locals don’t go and said there was no chance of a quick rescue. They even showed 3 minutes of helicopter footage of really dense jungle with high canyons known as the lost world. At the end he said if any teams thought it was too much for them he’d give them their money back there and then. He can’t resist playing for the cameras! No one took him up of course.
He was playing down the 3 courses stuff in the notes though – and it sounds like it’s just a set of short cuts towards the end to allow teams to finish rather than pull out. They ‘didn’t want to bother us with the details’ so we know very little. We were expecting to get the course, but we didn’t. We’ve only been told what to take to the start, which we’re being bussed to tomorrow night, and it could be a trek or river start. The rest of the mandatory equipment just has to go in our gear boxes and onto the trucks. Nor do we know where the start is – though the coach driver let slip he was taking us to the capital - Suva. It’s a 3 and half hour drive from our base near the airport at Nandi.
SleepMonsters
