Postcard from Rio

I suppose at this stage, some of you are wondering what on earth is happening to the Diary with your editor posting from odd parts of the world?



OK, an explanation is in order. And I'm writing this 'postcard' at a bar, as many of you often see me doing in Kilcullen, my laptop on the counter.

Except that this particular bar tonight is in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.



Here's the perspective: I'm a motoring journalist, as many of you know. I regularly travel on overnight trips across Europe to drive new cars. It isn't as exotic a life as most think, but I won't argue the fact that it is fun work.

But what I'm doing now is, as far as I'm concerned, the ultimate adventure. I'm one of a handful of journalists, maybe six or seven, who are covering the full month of the Land Rover G4 Challenge 2006, where competitors from 18 countries are driving Range Rover Sports and Land Rover Discoverys through Thailand, Laos, in Brazil and through Bolivia, taking part in a series of physical and strategic competitions as they go. The winner amongst them will get a fully-loaded Range Rover. We have an Irish representative, Gary Robertson from Enniskillen, and I'm more or less shadowing him all the way.

Most of my fellow journalists are just doing a week each, apart from 30 Italian hacks who are only here in Rio for the two nights on Copacabana beach. Part of what's required of those of us doing the real thing is that we drive the roads and tracks, we pitch and strike our own tents each night -- apart from one night each weekend in a hotel as the stages change. And we manage nutritionally on expedition food, heat-in-the-bag gunge.

We don't, and I couldn't, do the kayaking, running, rock climbing, swimming and other tough athletic disciplines which the actual competitors -- including Gary Robinson -- have to do each day.

So far, as has been indicated in the Diary, I've done the Thailand and Laos bit. Tonight I'm having a few beers in Rio to recover from a travel segment from SE Asia to South America that has had us in aeroplanes and airports for 37 hours on the trot ... including 28 hours in one plane, five hours of which was spent on the tarmac at Johannesburg in South Africa while they unloaded enough luggage to allow us load enough fuel to get to Rio.

This has been the adventure to end all my various adventures over my career. And promises more.



I learned just a little of what makes places like Laos tick, enough to make me want to revisit a little later in the experiment that I suspect will eventually see it as another Asian tiger.

I faced some fears, including paddling a dugout canoe through a 7.5km river under a mountain. I will be facing more, including my nemesis fear of heights when I'll be driving a Discovery up to the Andes plateau of Bolivia more than 14,000 feet high, on rubble roads with sheer and unprotected drops of sometimes thousands of feet.

In the course of that, compared to the average of 35degC which I experienced during my driving and camping in Laos, sometimes to the accompaniment of monsoon cloudbursts, I'll have to deal with temperatures of below freezing in my tent in Bolivia.

I'm so very fortunate to be able to do this adventure, which is designed to show Land Rover's 'ownership' of the adventure ethos in terms of off-road vehicles. It might seem a stupid thing to do at my stage of life, because it is by no means easy.

But, what else would the Diary's editor be doing?



It beats the hell out of walking down the street in Kilcullen and looking at the notices in the windows, to get stories for the Diary. That said, that same thing is probably the overall most important thing that I do ... when I'm not indulging in this kind of gallivanting.

So, would all of you out there read the notices for me while I'm away, and email them to me so I can keep the Kilcullen end of things up to date?

Meantime, I have to stop saying 'sabaidee' to people, the Laos word for 'hello', and get used to 'hola'ing people here in Rio. At least until I get to Bolivia. Don't know yet what to say there.

Brian Byrne.