XPD: About that last leg

Email from Tatum (Thurs, 27 May 2010, 14h26 SA – 22h26 Oz)

Ok about the last leg… Yet another sting in the tail. Just when we thought the last leg would hopefully be a straight forward one, we were wrong once again! It ended up as another 26hrs of bundu bashing through rain forest, trying to follow an old loggers’ trail that was non-existent. 

Navigation was almost impossible and our spirits were getting lower and lower. It just seemed so relentless. As we stood to navigate we watched leeches start to climb up onto us; but we got to the stage where we didn’t care. All we wanted was to get home.

Finally after going down the wrong ridge, going up, going down, going up again we hit the right one and ended up on the gravel road. What a relief! Now it was just 20km’s of a mixture of path, road and river tracks to the end. It was that simple until we thought we saw lights coming down the hill. Just what we needed to get a fire under our bums and get moving! And that is just what we did. At this stage we had no idea we were lying second and we weren’t sure who it could have been. Probably hallucinations by that stage, but it got us going.

And, if the whole race hadn’t been enough for us by then we walked into three snakes on the pavement as we approached Cairns. I jumped and yelled “Snake!” but at that stage we had seen so many weird and wonderful things our reactions were pretty slow. It was so surreal. The snakes were just lying there; the one hissed angrily at us. I know it seems hard to believe but I promise that they were there.

All that was left now was to find the phone booth 1km away from the finish and let them know we were on our way. Not so simple! After one hour of searching frantically for a phone booth – even asking taxi drivers to search as well and waking up people in their apartments –  we went up to 
where it should have been and there was a clip! Somewhere along the line we didn’t find out about this part.

I can’t tell you how frantic and panicked we were. We could see the finish but couldn’t go there! We were seeing telephone boxes in every tree we were so stuffed. We were seeing people who didn’t exist. It was one of the craziest experiences we have ever had and it just wasn’t ending. Finally we made it to the finish where Noodle [Nikki] was jumping up and down with champagne, tears and a big chocolate cake!

We had finally got to the finish after 6 days 13h 30 min! [Start at 15h05 on 19 May; finish at 01h53 on 26 May 2010]

A huge thank you to all of you out there who followed us, sent messages and energy our way. They were so great to get and kept us going when we were really low. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!

The day after: Ian was admitted into hospital with serious infections in his leg. After two antibiotic drips, one normal drip, tests, and some TLC he was released that evening. Tweet also went in for treatment and antibiotics. We are all now on the mend and relaxing with the other teams. Today we even managed to get in a snorkel on the Great Barrier Reef.

Wow what a race! There is just too much to say and write down and I need some time to think about it. This race was beeeeg. It was hard; the terrain, the length of the legs, the nasties that played a huge role and affected our morale and mental state. There is just too much to tell you but we will after a couple more sleeps.

So over and out from all us in Cairns. Lots of love and thanks again for the overwhelming amount of support you gave us.

xxhobs