Holly Budge

Well, I’m about 16km from the next checkpoint and had to stop as it started getting dark. I’m riding as part of a team with a girl called Sasha from South Africa, and we’re squashed into a small one man tent in the middle of the mountains in Mongolia. We’ve got our horses tied up to a rock and are really hoping they are still going to be there in the morning.

The horses scare really easily and so far just about all of us have fallen off. Our tent is flapping in the wind, and I hope it doesn’t scare them into running off tonight… otherwise we’ve got a long walk to the next checkpoint tomorrow morning and we’ve lost £500 each.

We’ve covered about 50km today, but were delayed this morning as a Spanish rider fell off his horse and had to be airlifted back to base due to spinal injuries. But we’ve been doing about 13.5 hours of riding each day; covering 80km on Sunday and 90km on Saturday. But its dawned on me that its going to take a bit longer than I originally thought, maybe 10-12 days. The distances are really long and you are really doing well if you manage to cover off 2 sections of 40km per day.

We’re doing really well though and are currently lying in 4th and 5th place in the race respectively. We took a bit of a chance and left the last checkpoint at 4.30pm this afternoon, thinking that we would make it to the camp at the next checkpoint, but the distances are very long and it got dark so we’ve just had to pitch up in the middle of no where.

But its really luck of the draw with the horses, or should I say donkeys in some cases! I’m on my 7th horse now in the race. At each checkpoint the horses are all lined up to choose from, if you ask the Mongolians which is the best horse, they are pointing out absolute donkeys.

I’m extremely sore, tired and have only eaten an energy bar today, we’ve hardly got any water between us. And need to be up at 5am tomorrow to reach the next checkpoint. Fingers crossed that my horse will be there in the morning.

Tags: 4th place, Holly Budge, Mongol Derby

This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 2:58 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.