Pierre Carter’s support, James Braid, has sent through another update. Today, Sunday 24 July is Day 8.
Well the last few days have been extremely tough and Pierre has been very ill. Since the race doctor checked on Pierre on Day 5, he has only improved slightly. We spent the night in Brunico hoping that the extra hours of rest would help him, but it hasn’t really had a significant effect. He seems to be fine for six or so hours and then just bursts into a fever, sweating and shivering. This lasts for a few hours, he rests, and then all is fine again.
On Day 6, we continued from Brunico and climbed up high above Ellen to sneak in a glide over the back towards Brixen. Most athletes walked round alongside the freeway (very scary with all those Italian drivers) so I think our route was far better. Once Pierre had reached the summit above Ellen, the wind was in our favour and he managed an evening glide into town.
This valley was the same valley where the French pilot had crashed earlier in the day, after flying into unmarked high voltage power lines, spanning across the valley. Pierre was luckier in that he managed to glide over them. They are totally invisible until the last second, no bouys, no markers, no nothing! The French pilot is okay; he threw his emergency parachute and landed safely into trees below. All the lines on his glider were sliced in half, so that was the end of his participation in this year’s race.
Brixen is one of these historical towns where the buildings in the old city are like 700+ years old. The street signs in Italy are very vague, the roads don’t have street names, numbers or directions, but rather the next town labelled on the sign board. I’ve done all my navigation so far using Google Maps on my mobile phone, but even this proved difficult. My GPS had given me a route directly through the old part of Brixen, to get to Pierre. Before realising it, the road I was on became cobbled and I was navigating my way down one-way alleys, between the old buildings, with only a few inches on either side of the van’s mirrors, herding tourists out of the way! If I had reached a dead-end, there is no ways I would have been able to reverse; I would have kicked out the front windscreen to climb out (couldn’t open the doors) and sold the car there and then.
Once again, the rain came puring down and the thought of camping in a tent on the side of a busy road, just wasn’t appealing. Lucky for us, Pierre had landed just up the road from a cheap hotel, so we checked ourselves in for the night, ate a real pizza and enjoyed a shower!
From Brixen, Day 7 was a very long and slow day. Pierre, not feeling much better, was only able to cover a few kilometres, then rest for several hours. The plan was to hike up to the summit at the end of the Varna valley and bomb down the other side to Sarentino. With no maps and no real plan, Pierre set off for the top. At the top, there was another summit behind the first one and yet another one behind that one! He continued and eventually stumbled into a hiking hut at the last summit. By then, the fog and rain had come in, so there was no chance of flying down. Since Pierre had no money on him, I had to drive up to the top, with dry socks and cash. We spent the night in the hut, a very pleasant experience and planned to fly down to Sarentino in the morning.
Today, Day 8, started with fog and snow! Although a novelty for South Africans, snow weather is not conducive to good paragliding and, again, Pierre was forced to walk down the western side to Sarentino, whilst I drove back down the eastern side and bought a hiking map.
Although this is the direct route, it is extremely energy consuming. Most of the other athletes continued on foot from Brixen to Bozen, alongside the busy motorway. This is a very long strectch, about 50km and a real unpleasant experience. Since this route goes more south and brings the athletes closer to the turnpoint, our position has dropped to almost last now, a result of our slower speed and more northerly route.
The reason for us taking this route is two fold: firstly, it clears the Bozen airspace and secondly, from Merano, there is a huge valley with (hopefully) easy paragliding. The weather really hasn’t been great for the last two days with a strong north foehn blowing. It is supposed to subside tomorrow or the next day, so hopefully the pilots can take their gliders out of their bags for a change.
At the front of the race, the leader, Maurer, is almost 100km ahead of second position Coconea. Maurer received a 24 hour penalty for infringing airspace, so he had the pleasure of a day off yesterday. Now that he is just short of Mont Blanc, we’re hoping he flies very quickly to Monaco, within the next day or two, so that this epic and difficult adventure will be over!
Since we’ve had to slow right down, we’re in the back-markers gaggle unfortunately, with five athletes more or less within 1km of each other, all on different routes. The Japanese pilot was eliminated this morning, so the race only has 22 athletes left. Our plan is to try and hang in there until Maurer makes the finish, then we’ll have to jump into the van and rush off to Monaco.
Pierre has just left now for another uphill leg, this time to the top of Merano 2000, the last peak before the huge Merano valley. Hopefully we’ll get over it tonight, otherwise we’ll have to sleep up there and glide down tomorrow morning. We’ll see in what shape Pierre
is shortly.Despite Pierre’s poor health at the moment, we’ve had a good race and a great experience. We didn’t really expect to get this far (hence we’re off our hiking maps), so we’re very happy with our improvement from the last one. But, we’re planning to hang in there until the end.
I hope you are all well, thanks for the messages of encouragement and support.
best regards,
James
Lovely photo of Pierre from a Day 7 news post on the Red Bull X-Alps website. If you’d like to get totally addicted to this race, try the live tracking.