Some time ago I found an old wiro notebook in a drawer. A scruffy wiro bound notebook with a photo of 2 men in a kayak with a bear on the front cover. In that notebook I found terrible sketches drawn in pencil made while travelling in 1991. One sketch leapt out at me. It was a rough pencil sketch of Mt Ararat from a backpacking trip to eastern Turkey. The sketch really surprised me – it was a very basic pencil sketch, drawn using a .5mm technical pencil on a cheap notepad. The sketch is just black and white… To my surprise the sounds and smells of the day came flooding back. Meeting some Kurdish goat herders and their flock near the base of Mt Ararat, about 10km from the Iranian border on a bright sunny but cool, alpine day. Along with memories of driving across the mountain steppe in an old Renault 19 and the smells of chai and coffee in a Doğubayazıt pasta solunu. It all came back come flooding back! Why did it evoke such vivid memories? I’m not really sure to be honest. Maybe t...
Now you're starting to wonder if I'm an absolute petrol head right? Well, you're probably right and the World Rally Championship only comes down the this way every 2 years or so, so why not check it out?
While most of the racing stages are set in picturesque countryside up north and around Raglan, the event is actually based at the Viaduct Events Centre in central Auckland. Check out the website for times, but you can catch the cars as they head in and out each day, get right up close to the mechanics as they work flat out to get crashed cars back in the race. There are even several stages in the Auckland Domain on Sunday, the last day of the event, so you can see some of the action without even venturing 'over the Bombay Hills'.
I captured the Mini Cooper of Dani Sordo (ProDrive - the same team that got an Aston Martin on the podium at Le Mans in the weekend) at lunchtime while the mechanics were hard at work...
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