Winners of Expedition Africa 2013, Haglofs Silva, have posted their race report. “After almost 100 hours of racing, day and night around the Drakensberg area we crossed the finish line as winners of 2013 years Expedition Africa,” they write.
The race started with a brutal 76 km trekking on the world’s heritage mountain Drakensberg, most of the time spent above 3000 m altitude. The scenery was amazing, with one checkpoint placed at the world’s second highest waterfall. We also had perfect weather, though a little too hot for Swedes coming from winter. As the sun set we started to descend the mountain and we reached the transition in fourth place, with three south African teams ahead of us who had taken a different (apparently faster…) route choice.
A 2 hour MTB section took us to the next big challenge, 75 km kayaking on a big lake and a narrow and partly fast flowing river. We kept a good pace directly from the start of the section and team spirit rose as we started to see teams in front of us. Halfway into the section we had climbed to second position and just as the sun rose and we entered some tricky rapids, where we passed team Cyonosis who had the lead until then. Ironically, as we were on a river, we all suffered pretty bad dehydration over the last hours of this section. We were told that the amount of hazardous chemicals in the water made it undrinkable even if treated, and our water bladders were empty since hours ago.
Read their full race report on the Team Haglofs Silva website.
Photo by Andreas Strand.