Expedition Africa - abundant adventures and friends

Back from Expedition Africa tonight. As much as the racers need time to digest their experiences, so do I.

Our media team is close knit and, like the teams racing, we spend 24hrs a day together - awake for many of these 24 hours too! We drive around, hike, navigate, spend hours waiting and then even more hours writing and editing and publishing. It's a very intensive time.

Team hunting - my favourite pasttime. We've got maps and spend time planning where to catch teams. And then we go out to hunt for them. Online tracking is awesome too - and when we can't get signal we use friends and family at home and race HQ to tell us where they are. Photo by Bruce Viaene.

And then we part ways. And my heart is very sad. Even after an hour or too away from them I feel a bit lost because a companion from the week is not at my side or sitting next to me working on their computers.

I return from a week of hard work, long hours and little sleep - just the way I like it.

But, more treasured are the renewed friendships, new friendships and most wonderful memories of adventures.

Day 1. After a splash in the river, I sat with Bruce Viaene and Steven Freitag watching teams descending the abseil. Photo by Bruce Viaene.

My posts from the race are all up on www.AR.co.za. I've had a blast writing about the race.

Steven Freitag has been shooting footage for short videos during the race. The one he showed at the post-race dinner was superb and I look forward to watching the full version. Here's Steven's YouTube channel so you can watch the vids already posted (Days 1, 2 and 3) and those to be uploaded.

Definitely check out the photos from the event by Bruce Viaene and Andreas Strand. These guys are the bomb - awesome images in the albums on the KineticGear Facebook page.

I spent much of my week hanging out with Bruce and also Martin Westerstrand, the photographer for teams Cinnober (team member Ida Svensson has a blog - some of Martin's photos are there) and Outnorth Adventure. Their photographs show some of the places that I visited with them.

That's it done. A most wonderful week. I'm blue. The better the time away and the adventures had, the worse the post-race blues. I'm VERY blue.

As the best way to beat post-race blues is to start planning other adventures, after a good night's sleep, that's exactly what I'll do.