Competitor's diary, August 16

A great day for racing as team enjoys countryside
Robert Nagle

We're just finishing up the fifth complete day of racing here at the Eco-Challenge. It's Saturday, and the last couple of days have been really great for us.

Yesterday was just such an incredibly magnificent day.

We started out in the morning with whitewater rafting on the Tully River, which is a really unusual technical river. And we had a total blast going down there. It was just so much fun.

And then there was a long walk, I guess it's called the Ace Track. A long bush walk, which was quite pleasant, through the tropical rainforest.

And then what really capped off the day was we got on the horses for a ride. With the horse section and the raft section occurring on the same day, we viewed the day as sort of a neutral day. Most of the teams would come down the river in about the same amount of time in the rafts, and the horses were limited to a certain maximum time, so we didn't really expect to gain or lose a lot.

(In order to make sure the horses weren't injured, the teams were limited to a predetermined time in which they could finish the horse leg. If they pushed the horses too hard and finished under the allotted time, they would be disqualified.)

So we knew we could enjoy things, and we certainly did. The ride was just magnificent.

We started out in the afternoon, riding through the tropical Queensland bush with four really superb horses. And along the way we picked the company of a singing cowboy who owns some of the horses. And he certainly entertained us with information about the bush, information about Australia, and his views on life. It was really fun.

In spite of that, in spite of the fact that there was a time limit on it, we managed to do really well, and come in just a couple minutes shy of the limit. Which meant that few of the teams could do much better than us in that.

We were also able to get much of the ride done in daylight. Which meant that due to the slippery conditions it made it that much more difficult for other teams to cut away at our lead.

That was fun.

So in spite of the fact that it was a neutral day, we actually had a lot of fun and maybe even gained some time over the other teams.

Racing out front makes it really difficult to know what is going on behind. The only people you meet are the people working at the Passport Controls. They're usually in remote, inaccessible areas, and they don't have updated information. So, you're out there, and you don't know what's happening behind.

Teams that come through subsequently get the chance to sneak a look at the sheets so they exactly how far ahead you are, and what you've done. I guess that puts us in some sense of disadvantage, but since we always try to race our own race, and not pay attention to people around us, it's not that big a deal for us.

Following the horses we got back on the mountain bikes for a really long leg. Unfortunately, we were riding at night, so a lot of the country we were passing through was really beautiful, you could see that by the moonlight, but we didn't really get a chance to experience it.

The ride was sort of a mixture of dirt roads and then a lot of winding in and out through old trails and some new scrambles through the rainforest. We had umpteen river crossings, I just can't begin to count them all, with water up to our waist at times. Working through problems like this in the middle of the night can be a bit of a problem. Especially on the fifth day of racing when the accumulated lack of sleep begins to get to you.

Following that really grueling mountain-bike stretch, we got back on foot over a very famous peak here in Queensland, Bartle Frere. That was quite a trek up — about a 1,000-meter ascent, and about a 1,500-meter descent, with lots of scrambling and boulder hopping. Pretty technical.

Unfortunately, the weather had clouded in when we got to the top, so we didn't have great views of the coastline. Everyone kept telling us that we would get to see that, but that wasn't to be.

We came down off Bartle Frere and we're just now headed to the beach for the final section of the race.

We're just walking across a railroad trestle in the midst of sugar cane country here, in southern Cairns. And we're headed for Brampton Beach, where the last leg of the race will start, a kayak into Cairns.

Robert Nagle is captain of Team Eco-Internet, and is filing regular dispatches from the course.