So I`ve just come back from spending a week in the middle of Sweden at an orienteering 5 day event called ORingen, the largest multi day event in the world. Fsr the non-oreinteers, but this post is going to sound as foreign as Swedish does to me, and it`ll probably be as boring as most We arrived at the campsite and set up shop with a couple of other Aussies and a buch of the Oz juniors who`d just finished competing at the Junior World Champs in Lithuania. Similar juniors from Ireland, Austria and of course, New Zealand were nearby. Camp life was a little difficult on the first day due to a lack of tables and chairs. The event organisers had placed picnic tables at various locations around the campsite but they were being underutilised so we took it upon ourselves to move them to a more central location, namely next to our tents. The orienteering itself was a different experience altogether. Compared to a 60 person event in Tassie or 600 people at a national event running in the forest with 15,000 runners is pretty cool. People everywhere going in all directions and there are awesome tracks made on the ground leading you everywhere if you`re a late starter. Also if you find yourself all alone its a pretty good indicator somethings wrong - not that that happened very often! The terrain was great - you here how difficult and technical it is, but apart from a couple of insane areas I found it OK. Think Bronte Park in Tassie with no vague areas and more contour detail. We were told it was steep as well, but I don`t call 6 contour lines a hill. Hardest thing was the runnability, most of my poor times come from struggling through rocky, broken ground (again like Bronte). I developed pretty bad blisters and couldn`t complete day 4 to much frustration. I was surprised and relieved to see that they have done away with the communal toilets, which would consist of a big long bench with holes in it at regular intervals that sat over a long open channel on a gradient that would collect the goods . No partitions. However the outdoor communal showerrs remained. Imagine a 20x20m grassed area blocked off with a `stage'at one end with 100 or so shower heads. Go in, strip off, stand in the queue, fins a shower head, get wet, step away so someone else can have the water, lather up, find another shower, remove suds, dry off, change, leave. Wasn't that bad at all, just sort of abstract showering with all those guys and knowing none of them and it did give us some funny stuff to talk about back at the campsite. Is a little worrying seeing how the male body ages though. All in all a pretty top week - this post relly doesn't convey it, but I guess it's those you've got to be there things. I don't know why, but orienteering trips never fail to disappoint. On to Iceland! PS Also got a dip in the Baltic Sea. Word to the wise, the sea at 60 deggress N is a lot colder than at 42 degrees south!