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This is the single-news section of the
marathonrally.com rally-live special of the Rainforest Challenge 2006. To navigate please use the upper or right Navigation Bar.
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Rainforest Challenge: A beautiful lake-side camp on Thursday.
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After the wild nights of the recent days on Thursday the Rainforest Challenge camped in one of the nicest locations so far. The camp was situated near a big lake in the middle of a valley surrounded by green mountains. After a transport stage of about 30 km for which the convoy needed about 3 hours three special stages each of about 500m were prepared for the participants. The first stage was entirely situated in the lake water - here the task was to drive several circuits through several waterholes and muddy areas blocked with tree stumps.
The following two stages were on dry ground - a more or less hard fast speed stage in dry grass and a tricky route over a mess of fallen trees. The latter stage was however canceled by the organization after the first two took longer than expected.
The first participant starting into the water stage was the Austrian Markus Osswald who equipped himself with a scuba diving mask to the amusement of the numerous spectators. He drove rapidly splashing huge water fountains in front of his vehicle and had a very special spectator - the minister of the Kedah state visited the trophy for several hours to get a some impressions of the action and participants. Markus Osswald is at the moment on place 4 in the standings. The leading positions are taken by two local champions (Jeep and Toyota) and a team from Indonesia (Jeep).
Still struck by disaster remains the Polish Landrover Team: after an axle breakdown other structural parts failed followed by the breaks. After a long repairing session the team managed to arrive on Thursday virtually in the last minutes before the stage was closed. In the beginning darkness after sunset they drove the stage without problems. "We were in total in place 7, now we are on 14. In total 4 complete stages are missing for us" so a team member. "Unfortunately we still do not know if the car will stay stable now..."
The spectators' favourite team still remains a duo from China in a blue Jeep rented in Malaysia. An older and a younger driver take their turns to drive the car through the special stages. While the younger one retains perfect control over the car and situation the older driver's strength is definitely not comparable.
And so the horde of spectators always takes a quick glance into the cockpit who is driving today when the blue Jeep appears on stage. If the older driver is sitting behind the steering wheel a cheering crowd quickly grows eager to see what goodies "father-jeep" has in his presentation for today. The highlights so far: choking the engine at the start (!) repeatedly until the maximum time was over, flipping the car over, driving full speed with a still fully extended winch cable, winching to too thin trees (which then fall on the car), wanting to drive the stage in the wrong direction and various individual shortcuts.
The local champions regularly manage to extract astonished gasps from the gazing crowds. They almost always manage to drive the stages blazingly fast in spite of the obstacles. Even more astonishing is that you can hardly see any repairing activities in their area of the camp at night - especially after seeing with what kind of reckless brutality they force their vehicles over giant rocks or other obstacles. That evening the tents were erected directly next to the shore of the lake. And the mandatory guitar singing group round a camp fire quickly grew into a large crowd exchanging the most adventurous stories from all over the world.
On Friday the convoy of the Rainforest Challenge 2006 is starting into the long awaited "Twilight Zone". In three days the teams have to drive about 50 km through the densely grown jungle on tracks that have no longer been in use since about 30 years. In between in case of conditions permitting there will further special stages. This means cutting and driving themselves a way through the green, building bridges over rivers and winching themselves over hills.
Only a small fraction of the press convoy will follow the participants into the Twilight Zone as here everyone is on its own and the unexpected is to become the expected. Only that much: in previous years the organization needed up to two weeks to get all vehicles out again when the weather was bad. Once the convoy found themselves totally trapped when they had to reverse in front of a large landslide only to find that 10 km behind them another landslide had washed the track away in the meantime.
With the passing of the Twilight Zone the Rainforest Challenge 2006 will end on Monday with a big party in a hotel near to the finishing line. After that the participants will go back to Kuala Lumpur where the trophy also will be finished for the international press.
2006/12/05 | 03:15 CET | Editor: RFC Live-Team/js
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