If You Want to Know the Way Ask ...

Rob Howard / 11.12.2013

It wouldn’t be wise to tell any of the Bivouac Colts team that the best thing to do when you are lost is ask a policeman – there may be an extreme reaction!

The young kiwi team have had a nightmare finish to their race, made much worse by a well meaning but hapless Costa Rican police officer. The team were already in trouble, exhausted, sleep deprived and unable to find CP48, which has caused so much trouble to so many teams. They were lost in the night and had been searching for it for hours while holding 11^th place in the race, but had been passed by two Spanish speaking teams who found it easier to get directions (because the map was not a lot of help).

The team were quite close to the CP (though they didn’t know it) when the policeman arrived and said they couldn’t be there and had to follow him. The team were hardly in any state to argue and followed him as directed at which point he left them to find out more (he turned up at the finish line).  Now the team were even more lost. “We asked him to tell us where we were but he couldn’t read a map, maybe had never seen one before!” Said Becky Law. “We got him to ring Pongo to try and get him to take us back to where we were – but Pongo just said we had to find our own way!”

The policeman set off to the finish and they never saw him again, but now were even more lost (and further from the checkpoint). The team bedded down for the night to wait for daylight and next morning asked someone far more sensible for help – a 15 year old boy. “We showed him the map and he managed to figure where his house was,” said Law. “Then he lead us there, so we knew where we were – he was on a beat up bike but we couldn’t keep up!”

The team eventually took 31 hours for the cycle stage and the Issy Aventure team told me they helped them to find the checkpoint in the end. With not enough map detail and tricky placement CP48 has proved to be almost impossible to find for many teams in the dark and in retrospect was not the best positioned for the end of such a long race.

When Bivouac Colts made the finish they crossed the line in something of a daze, looking neither relieved or angry – I think they had used up all of their emotional energy overnight – but they’d held onto their determination to finish.

They have still finished in a high position in the World Champs, as the top Kiwi team (15^th I think), and when they reflect on the race the experience will only give them greater confidence they can finish whatever happens. 

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