Two hours. Four controls found. Bailed after failing to find no 5.  DNFed.  I certainly wasn’t the only one either. Only about 2/3 of the field have completed all 4 days.  Ian is the sole survivor in the Australian camp after Ilze also DNFed and Pete was not well enough to compete. Ian did quite well today and improved his overall position through attrition.

On the plus side, we got to see a Byzantine aqueduct, and camels.  Just your average Saturday picnic in the Belgrade forest.

Byzantine aqueduct in the Belgrade forest

After the slowest bus ride back to town yet (I am heartily sick of sitting on crawling buses in Istanbul traffic), Ian and I visited the Basilica Cistern, a huge underground water storage which was built in 532 AD and is quite atmospheric with its 300 columns (though the eerie music was probably overkill).  There are large fish in the water, which comes from the very aqueduct we saw in the forest earlier.

The water ends up here in the Basilica Cistern, underneath Sultanahmet

Medusa column – no idea why it’s upside down

So how is orienteering in Istanbul organised? Very smoothly by our observation.  The volunteers are all young, enthusiastic and efficient.  The start team of about 8 does an excellent job every day.  The finish tent runs on minimal equipment and staff, but there are never any queues and no apparent problems.  They use OE2010 which allows live updates to the net.  Their infrastructure is much the same as ours, with the exception of strange PVC tree structures which hold the maps in the start chute – you take yours from the correct “branch”, but often you pull out several maps so it’s not very efficient.  Other differences – each age group has a different course, and no maps are collected afterwards, even at today’s world ranking event.  There are the usual O-shops, announcer and music, results board – it all looks very much like an Australian arena.  The demographic is younger here with a more even spread across age groups instead of our clusters of 55-65 year olds.  We can’t fault the mapping.  All in all a very well run event, just wish the forest was more user-friendly!

Ilze takes a map from the map tree