Well - what can i say. The past 5 days have involved little sleep, late nights, early mornings, coach rides, rain, walking thru forests and mud, sitting with mice, meeting some amazing people, watching some amazing drivers, feeling patriot, and seeing some beautiful scenery. Hence i havent had any time to post on my blog.

As you can see from the map relating to this blog, there is a lot of lakes in the area of the rally. Its known as the 1000 lakes district and i think we may have seen a good 100 odd of them.

The forests are mostly silver berch trees and pines, which is great for the hayfever. The weather was four seasons in one day kind of stuff. One morning we started out and it was sooooo cold i brought a beanie, then by early afternoon we were all lying in the paddock sunbathing while we waited for the cars, and then rushing for our rain coats and umbrellas to battle a storm that lasted only 20 minutes, ending with another beautiful afternoon. WILD

The scenery reminded me even more of Canada, there are elks and even bears in the forest, none of which we saw.

The tour group was big, two coach loads - 101 people,. We were on coach A and that was mainly Aussie's and Kiwi's and a couple of great guys from Poland. The aussies were trying to claim Hayden Paddon as their's, even suggesting that they would give us back Russell Crowe or Keith Urban, ,,, yeah right. Mind you with Hayden crashing out we had to adopt Scott Pedder as ours.

I loved the fact that all the spectactors were so loyal to their flags. It was great to see all the country flags being carried around. All the kiwis in our group had flags so it was great to see so many.

Mind you it made me appreciate this arguement about changing the flag. Whilst at home i was bitterly against it. "How could they consider changing the flag," but now being over here, i have to say that the black flag with the silver fern says :NZ" far easier than our current flag that is so similar to the australian flag. We had both flags with us, but gave up on the "real" flag and just carried the silver fern.

My best buddie on the tour had to be my mate Mat Box. Thanks for all the great conversations - oh and the vodka.!!!! Totally enjoyed your company. Mat has the greatest dreadlocks and is a pretty cool dude. I loved hassling him ... pretty much about everything. He pointed out to me how people gravitated to him and made assumptions about him cause of his hair, and i have to admit it was pretty true and pretty fun.

The hardest thing with the rally tour was a) being prepared with all the stuff you really need, ie decent seating, rugs to sit on,, and a Chilly Bin (eski) oh and access to buy some booze. A couple of the stages had bars but most were pretty dry. We were getting in late at night and leaving at some goddammed hour of the morning so we had no time to get to a supermarket. Some of the days were pretty long as we would get into a stage 2 hours prior to a car coming thru,..... The last day of the rally only had two stages, so we were at the same spot for the two stages. So 4 - 5 hours. There were soooo many people there. Getting in early and being on the bus we were taken right to the stage but as we drove out we saw that most people had to walk at least 4 klms along the road. This was increased as the paddocks that had been set up for parking were all flooded and the few people that had tried to get in, hadnt been successful and the entrance was blocked for others.

I will try to get David to write a blog about the actual rally,,,, I know he enjoyed it, especially as we got invited to meet up with Hayden on the last day after prizegiving. Hayden works in with Rally Travel and he specifically asked to meet the NZers that had come to support him. Which was only about 10 -12 of us... so good sized group.

Got a few pics of Jari-Matti Latvala as he arrived at the same bar where we met Hayden.... so all good.

The morning we left wasnt good for anyone. We had all been into the main town for the party atmosphere, whilst David and I made it back to the hotel at around 1am, i would suggest that we were some of the earliest in. Marty Rostenberg slept thru his alarm in the morning and we were all on the bus and he had to get called from his room, he was pretty quiet on the bus for the 3 hour drive back to Helsinki.