Incredibly Tough..
but an amazing heap of Fun
I cant wait till next year!
We started off (Friday 10pm - all times are extremely rough estimates) in 2 groups, one to the east & one to the west of the 3 km radius terrain. We then had to meet up somewhere to exchange decoder keys (6amà. After exchanging we looked for a code (7 am), had a small nap (8am) & went off to our checkpoint..
The rest is for later as I already fell asleep just now
Continuing..
Once arrived at our checkpoint (12 am), we dug out the 30cm tent rod (with our bare hands & some stones we found) and continued for out first outer ring checkpoint. This one was conveniently close, about 1 km (again, estimates) away. We cleared the checkpoint without any problems (at about 1pm) We then started off to our second checkpoint, 3,5km further. We had a closer one but deemed it too dangerous to bother.. We ran into some other people who told us stories about people getting caught there.. We cleared the second checkpoint, had another 45 minute nap (till 7pm) & dragged ourselves to our last checkpoint of the outer ring.
There we had a planning moment, where we decided upon the following 3 checkpoints. Tired as hell, we started off & after an excruciating trek got to the second checkpoint of the first ring. Pain and Suffering ensued as we started for the second one. Luckily we decided to follow the stream of a lil river thingy & not to try to climb those mountains again bc that would have been suicide. Things were getting dark by now (9pm) The river plan worked out wonderfully, we met up with some survivor buddies & reached the second checkpoint. (10pm) Once there we decided it would be a close one. We had about 2 hours left to get to home. One second ring checkpoint, 2 inner ring checkpoints (only about 2Om apart, we were told) and the spotting of "home" which was easily possible from as far as 1km by bare eye (we had binoculars) This was doable. If all went well..
Well, it didnt. We had no flashlight (lost it in the morning) & a cell phone light isnt all that to read a compass with! So no real compass tracking. No problem, we had the map & I knew exactly where we were. We continued along a road and crossed a field, all heavily guarded by hunters. We were looking for a certain path & discovered it to be A LOT further than we initially thought. We didnt find the second path (that was CRUCIAL to our plan) and just went trough the bushes. We found our second path (altough we re not all that sure about it being the Right path) and started off, only to discover that the things we were expecting werent there. By now it was (11.30 pm) so we had no chance of making it. We phoned in to try & check in our last checkpoint, only to have our deepest fears confirmed, we were at the wrong place! (she did tell us there were others who had that same problem, so it might have been the maps :s)
We decided to call it a night & arranged a pickup. We didnt make it, but we did manage to keep all our lives. Only 2 other groups managed to!
We learnt a lot & .. next time will be BETTER :D