T'walk 2009

My flatmate Nick convinced me that I should join his Twalk team this year and so I did.

Twalk stands for Twenty-four-hour Walk and is a variant of "Rogaining" (after the founders' names: Rod, Gail and Neil) which is a close cousin to orienteering. I am a little hazy on the actual difference between the two, except that they evolved differently from a historic perspective. Rogaining evolved from bushwalking in Australia and orienteering was first done in Europe.

Either way, this one wasn't a pure rogaining event anyway. The way this race worked is that each team gets a map with controls marked:
... and has 24 hours to get as many of them as possible. The twist in this event is that the controls aren't as easily identifiable as in a normal rogaining or orienteering event - meaning they weren't big orange markers hanging in a tree but little tiny pieces of plastic hidden under a tree leave, covered by a bush or drowned in a lake.
And to make it 'easier' to locate them every team member gets a cryptic clue sheet that looks like this:
There is also a certain amount of sneakiness involved as you have to hide your find from other teams in the vicinity. And if somebody from another team wants to know how many controls you have found, or if you have found a specific one - you lie like Pinocchio!

So we all drove up to Christchurch. I hitched a ride with Kelvin and his wife Beatrice and when he picked me up he said, "We have to herd some sheep pretty quick. I hope you don't mind." I thought there would be dogs involved but was told that we are the dogs. It was quite an experience trying to outsmart the sheep. Although not very difficult :)

We met our teammates at the meeting point in a parking lot at the U of Christchurch, where we signed in and checked out each others costumes:
Our team name was "Bush & Balls" which is a wordplay on the infamous annual OUTC bushball (which is an actual ball in a tramping hut in the hills) but of course the name invited other interpretations. Just can't get away from GW:

After everybody was checked in we were on our way to the start point (which was secret and not revealed until that time). They kicked us out along the road somewhere, and off we went to the hash house (which is like a central base camp and acts as the resting point between the legs).

There were 9 people on our team and everybody had to do the first leg but only 2 people per team have to do the whole 24 hours, the rest of the team members can choose which legs they want to do. Elke and Keith were the two lucky 24-hour-ers:
This is how our team did in the race:
1st leg -- 10:30am to 3:30pm -- 5 hours --
2nd leg -- 4:00pm to 8:00pm -- 4 hours --
3rd leg -- 8:30pm to 5:40am -- 9 hours 10 minutes
4th leg -- 6:30am to 10:25am -- 4 hours -
5th leg -- didn't get to that one.
(I did the 1st and the 3rd leg.)

There is a mandatory break of 30 minutes between the legs. While there are 5 legs, very rarely does a team manage to get on the last leg.

Here are a few picture from the 1st leg:
Right after the start:
Our team strategizing:
These guys won the costume contest (they actually wore those cardboard cans all the way through the first leg!):
They did have to take that costume off every once in a while, like here when we had to climb over a fence (and we climbed lots of fences during the race!):
Scenery ---The most memorable thing from the 1st leg was the Maragouri which is the only native plant with thorns. Nice close-up picture here. Somehow I managed to get in the middle of a huge patch of it and all of a sudden there was no way out but right through them. And I was in shorts! Ouch!
I can't quite remember how long that leg was but I think around 18km.
Eventually we got to the hash house (which in real life is a cattle barn):
...had some food...
..and after 30 minutes the people for leg 2 took off. Meanwhile the rest of us set up a tent and caught some sleep:
The sun set around 6pm so by the time I woke up it was dark and time to get ready for the night leg.
That leg was truly amazing! The whole leg happened in the dark from 8:30pm to 5:40am. We each had a head lamp and then a few of us had some extra special 'flame throwers' so we had enough light to look for the controls which got increasingly difficult to find. One of them for example was hidden in a rabbit hole according to the clue sheet - and there were about 50 rabbit holes in that area. While we still did pretty well finding controls we weren't able to defend the first place we were in after the first 2 legs. I have to admit to not finding a single control during the whole race. Some of my team mates were pretty amazing with that stuff. One of them was a surveyor and he triangulated almost exactly to the right spot a few times and then had some special luck on top of that, like when he found the control under a rock - in the middle of a rock field with about a thousand rocks!
We did the race in the opposite direction from everybody else and therefore ran into a lot of people from the other teams. It was amazing how some of them lied to lead us in the wrong direction!

The temperatures dropped severally during the night to about -7C at the end of our leg. On top of that Elke and Stephen missed a tussock when jumping across a creek - and went in up to their armpits. They were pretty hypothermic by the end of it. We all were pretty cold afterwards as none of us really had enough clothes for those kind of temps.

This is a picture of surface hoar crystals - pretty cool!
We eventually made it back to the hash house were the rest of our team was waiting ready to tackle the next (and last) leg. I was glad to be able to climb in my sleeping bag and warm up. A hot tub would have been nice :)

(Since I was the only 'tourist' on our team there are no pictures from the legs I didn't do.)
Everybody was back before 10:30am the next morning (they took a lot of points off if you were late). The awards ceremony happened after giving people some time to gather their wits and eat some food.
We did pretty well and made 4th place out of 43 teams. Missed 3rd place (and fancy prizes!) by just 12 minutes! The most impressive team IMHO were "The Oldies". Everybody on that team (and they only had 3 members, 2 men - 1 woman) was over 65 and did all 4 legs! I hope I will still be able to do that kind of stuff when I am that age. Something to aspire to for sure.

The organizers also thanked the farmer and his family who let us use his barn and his land :)
Oh, here is a picture of the barn after they cleaned it up afterwards:
On the way back we stopped at friends of Kelvin's and the guy wore a "Latitude 62" t-shirt from Talkeetna! He had actually worked there a few years ago - as had I. Crazy how small the world is.