Yes, well that's the question you all want to know the answer to ! ...and at the risk of being a spoiler, the answer is Yes (we think).
Some rough results (I will confirm more later) are: Adam 14th-ish (an excellent result for all 5 tx's on a longer course than we've ever experienced before Me (Bruce) 24-ish (last I looked....) Bryan 43-ish We do know Adam's time beats Yuri (the USA previous world champion from Hungary), and my time beats the other USA seniors, so it's looking good -:)
Now, we will have some pictures for you. Peter Fraser has volunteered to put them up on his site, I have emailed them to him. Peter will hopefully announce where to find them when he has !
The pictures might lag the story a bit. Hopefly I will catch up eventually !
Today was a 5am wake up (groan), breakfast & hopefully grabbing all the gear we needed & out to the buses. Off we go is a mammoth porcession, complete with Police escort and traffic priority provided. There were police holding off traffic even on a freeway at one point so we could do a strange exit up an entrance lane ! All very impressive, and at the same time the scale of it all a bit unnerving.
Off the freeways we headed down bumpy roads through small Chinese villages about 1.5 hours out of Nanjing (don't ask me where !). The villagers were all out in force to witness the spectacle of the bus cavalcade. There were even ARDF posters plastered to some of the walls. We arrived at the destination out behind yet another small village. All the local children were out to see the foreigners.
Bryan was first out with the 6th group. Groups are let out at 5 minute intervals. I had about a 2 hour wait till I went out, Adam went last about an hour or so later. The sun came out today and it ended up being quite warm and clear. Lucky I happened to pop the sunscreen in my bag. I was in the same group as my Belgium team leader friend, Maurice. I was number 001, but he lucked James Bond - 007.
The course itself was quite long and hilly. There were areas where it was very slow movement, as well as areas of closely spaced plantation that was possible to move through reasonably quickly, and a number of tracks, but some areas of the map were a bit inaccurate in ths tracks (some new tracks were there, and of some old tracks shown there was simply no sign and had to be bush-bashed.
Every 2m TX was atop a significant hill. Sometimes you could tell the transmitter wasn't far away, but to get there was quite a different matter !
Unfortunately I did the transmitters in a non-ideal order, having to backtrack at the end to get one, but in retrospect it wasn't too bad a route choice. It just toome a while. I had about 15 minutes left of the 130, and I decided to abort getting that last transmitter, and turned around to head for the finish. Later I found out I was less than 200m from the transmitter, but the time I didn't feel I could risk being late (which means instant disqualification).
I had some trouble with my smart card at the readers, especially at the last two checkpoints. I personally would not recommend this system !
Now I have to go and talk about my post tour details. I will give you more results when we know them, as well as the fastest times (and some pictures).
Bye for now Bruce ----------------------------------------------------------------- --------
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