10th ARDF World Championships - Nanjing - Day 2

Did we cream the Yanks? (China #3)

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

Team results and a tomb (china #4)

Firstly, Peter is putting up pictures when I manage to send them to him at the
following web address:

http://www.qsl.net/vk3zpf/china/day1.htm
http://www.qsl.net/vk3zpf/china/day2.htm

...and so on.

Well late last night we got the official results for the 2m competition, and we're quite
happy with them !
The full results will probably appear on http://www.crsa.org.cn at somne stage.
Here's some highlights:

Team Australia 9th in Senior division. China 1st.
What is of note is we beat Japan, Kazakstan, Korea, USA(Yay!), France and Yugoslavia.
If we count only the truly 'A'RDF teams (those who actually have Amateur callsigns,
we came 3rd !!

In individual results, The best China time was 57 minutes for 5 TXs. Nikolay from
Kazakstan was 2nd with 57 mins. Adam was 15th with 94 mins, I was 32nd with 115mins
(4TX) and Bryan 39 with 125mins (3TX).
Adam was thrilled he beat the tall Chinese guy from Korea.
Kurt (Belgium) was 38th with 113mins & 3TX.
Alex (Kazakstan) came 7th in the Old Timers with 74 mins.
Best US result was Rob Cooley (an orienteer) who managed 9th in Vets.

Some of the comments we have heard about the course:
It was long !
Many of the tracks weren't there.
You had to read the map and keep track of where you were in order to have a chance
of finishing reasonably. It was a good 'navigational' course.
Map detail was lacking.

I will take a photo of the map soon.

This morning we visited a Masoleum. Lots of steps and photos. What more can be said ?

Some titbits of info:
The New Century Hotel turns out to be fully owned by the Phone campany that is
sponsoring the event. It is 5 star and otherwise would be costing a fortune -:)
Speaking to a Yugoslavian student who is competing: He was born in Slovenia, but had to
move to Yugoslavia in 1991 due to the war because his father was born Yugoslavian.
However, the Croatian, Slovenian and Yugoslavian teams are all good friends. They
had to get individual sponsorship in order to come here.

Jack, The Region 3 championships will be in Mongolia next year (2001) around about the
end of June. The Mongolian team captain invites us all. We are not sure if we'll be hit
with the Kareoke yet.... There was echo on the tour leaders microphone....
First aid was not required, but Adam did damage himself a bit falling a couple of times.
I used my first aid kit for one of the Yanks who had cut his hand.

This afternoon we go on a bit more touring, after a team leaders meeting and lunch I must go !!

Bruce

ARDF halts Nanjing (China #5)

OK, I know this is two in one day, but this event just has to be reported.
Tour day was today. The Mausoleum is what you would expect...a lot of stairs
and not much when you get to the top -:)
There was one amazing event today, however....

As part of the afternoon tour, we were taken over the Nanjing bridge over the
ChangChang (Yankze) river. The bridge is over 1.5km long. Impressive as it was,
it was not nearly as impressive as the lengths the organisation went to to ensure
smooth passage for the ARDF bus cavalcade.
Bsically peak hour traffic was halted over the bridge for us to have exclusive
access (we're talking like trying to block the Sydney Harbour bridge here). We wound
from one side of the road to the other, a line of about 15 buses with multiple
police car escorts. Traffic was stopped in one direction or the other based
on where we happened to be with other squads of police cars. Any cars getting in
the way of our offical speedy transit were blasted with the extremely serious horn
on our bus (we happened to be in the lead bus behind the two police cars).

This was amazing enough, but at the far end we left the highway, did an odd U turn
in a nearby road, and then proceeded do it all again back over the bridge in the
other direction. I have some pictures of all this, but it doesn't really capture
the amazement we felt about the whole operation. The bridge itself tended to be secondary -:)
The police escort, with sirens blazing, then led us into the middle of downtown
Nanjing, the whole caboodle into a pedestrian only zone into the middle of the
market for our dinner in a nearby restuarant.

Anyway, 80m tommorow so I'm off to bed.

Bruce

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