Welcome To The Jungle

The Rainforest Challenge Has Entered Its Fifth Year And It Is Bigger Than Ever.

- Aatish Mishra

I was trudging through ankle-deep slush to get to the stage. This trail went on for nearly a kilometre and I had no choice but to walk it as our taxi wouldn’t have made it past the first five metres. If I was lucky, one of the many D-Max V-Cross pick-ups being used as support vehicles by the event organisers would pass by and I’d hop into the back. No such luck yet, so I continued to walk. This was the easy bit. Getting into the stage and finding a good spot to shoot from was slightly harder. As slippery as this trail was, once you turned off the main trail, you were in a dense, virgin forest. So now, it was slippery and tricky to manoeuvre through. Then there was the danger of getting ploughed down by an out-of-control vehicle, getting sliced in half by a snapped winch cable, or just embarrassingly losing footing and cracking your skull on a rock. Fun. That’s when I heard it — the unmistakable burble of a straight-piped V8 engine — so I scrambled to get off the track to someplace safe.