By David, on September 8th, 2009 This was billed as the hardest day of the tuk-tuk race – 192km across some harsh off-road terrain, plus a few tricky challenges. I again awoke at 6am for our briefing session to be greeted with the news that there had been an accident in the night. Two guys had given a local journalist a lift back to a nearby village in the pitch darkness and flipped the Tuk Tuk. As I said in the previous post, driving at night is crazy. The roads are covered in potholes and have no lights. The female journalist was taken to hospital suffering a large gash in her foot (apparently her tendons were sticking out which made the nurses gasp with horror!)
We delayed the start of the challenge until 9am, so managed to fit in a little more sleep, before heading off up a crazy dirt track to the big pillar which sits in Siguriya. We stopped off to climb the rock which has truly breathtaking views over Sri Lanka from the summit. The climb was fairly challenging but well worth it. There is an enormous sleeping Buddha to meet you when you near the top too – just before the climb gets really challenging through rocks and small holes.
After our climb the race continued, with a new challenge – off-roading! After passing the ‘turning’ to take us off-road about 3 times, we finally turned onto this dirt track, through a stream and up a steep embankment where I tipped the Tuk Tuk to the point of almost rolling it. A team behind us, Shosalosa, came to our rescue and held us upright, but not before I’d smashed my leg on a metal bar which resulted in a very painful bruise to my shin.
We trundled on slowly until we came to some army training barracks and several check points, where we were frisked by the police. (NB We later found out the same police had asked some of the girls in another team to come see the ‘elephant’ behind the bushes. When they obeyed, the policeman proceeded to unzip his flies and show the girls a Sri Lankan elephant!) It was at the army barracks that we passed the Natural Tukkin Idiots – Ryan and Katie, who had snapped both their clutch and gear cables whilst in the lead but were now dead last! Obviously we really wanted to help our stranded team mates, but were too busy laughing at their misfortune, so we left them. They didn’t seem too bothered – we left them eating little coconut biscuits donated by a local family at the side of the road.
The final leg was a gruelling 70km run down a practically straight but very bumpy road to our camp site with the Veddah. The Veddah are Sri Lanka’s indigenous population which are now confined to just a small part of central-southern Sri-Lanka. At first we were pretty scared by this man wearing only a thong and holding an axe shouting at us. Then when we found the camp, and saw a large gathering of scantily-dressed guys hanging around our Tuk-Tuks, we felt a little more at ease.
The night was crazy, with the Veddah giving us a crazy dance show around a camp-fire – hitting the flames and shouting. The children Veddah seemed fascinated by our beer – and kept asking for alcohol. Julian and Juan, the Lanka Challenge organisers later told us it is a huge problem – that the Veddah have become addicted to our western alcohol and its ruining their way of life.
We headed to the tent for some sleep, which came surprisingly easily as the day had been so tiring.
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