A-Tek’s Eco-Challenge

Sean Morley / 04.11.2002

It is always hard to accept defeat especially when you have put so much time and energy into something. We always knew it was going to be very tough and we were perhaps unlucky that Mark Burnett had chosen this year to re-establish The Eco as the toughest adventure race on the planet. As complete \'Rookies\' we were like lambs to the slaughter!

As soon as we saw the course layout just before the start we realised that we had made some assumptions that would immediately put us on the back foot. We had banked on a considerable part of the race being on the water, kayaking to the islands and stuff. As it was the sea kayaking was an after-thought and the very last discipline of the race. I was gutted as sea kayaking is my own personal forte.

It soon became apparent that the majority of the race early on would involve Jungle Trekking. None of us had done any before and it involved a steep learning curve. Lack of attention to detail when reading instructions and errors interpreting the 1:50000 maps lead to us reaching the first checkpoint in a lowly 76th place.

We were in high spirits though and headed down river on our \'Billybilly\' bamboo raft looking forward to the 5 hours the locals had said it would take to complete the journey. 12 hours later we are still punting away having gone through the night in the pitch black. Again a simple navigational error had cost us three hours - we ended up pushing the raft upstream when we missed a junction in the river in the gloom. We were not alone, however, and having realised our error early on were able to overtake a number of teams who were \'lost\' further upstream.

The long night on the Billybilly ended with a trial of strength and sense of humour when we had to dismantle the raft and carry the huge bamboo poles up a ridiculously steep and muddy slope much to the amusement of the local villagers. A quick shower and we were off on foot into the Lost World! Several teams attempted a short cut up a stream and then through the jungle. Many got lost for hours, some for days! After our previous errors we took the more defined route up a large river, employing a local guide to show us the best crossing points.

We hadn\'t really cottoned on to the fact that the Eco-Challenge organisers were encouraging us to use the locals \'to the full\'. For some teams this meant that the local guide was carrying the pack of the weakest team member and some were reported to have used a horse to carry all their packs! I have to say that as a team were not entirely comfortable with the notion of cheque book adventure racing where the team with the most cash could employ the most guides and gain considerable advantage.

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