More entries, more interest and more details.

With nine months to go before the first car is flagged off on the start of the nine-day East African Safari Classic Rally, the entries are building up steadily. There are now twenty-eight confirmed entries and just over another twenty on the stand-by list which makes it look as if the maximum number of sixty crews might be exceeded leaving a few late entries disappointed.
Among the latest entries are Josef Pointinger from Austria in his well-known Ford Escort Mk1 while Albert Michiels arrival on the list brings the number of entries from Belgium up to a total three and his is the second Porsche 911 among them. Jayant Shah from Tanzania is once again joined by Lofty Drews, a Safari veteran and now resident in Australia, and this year they will be in the Datsun 260Z that Lofty prepared for the 2005 event but which arrived from Australia a day too late to take the start.
Although the details of the actual route are secret until the rally starts, the Safari organisers have released an outline of the rally with locations of the night halts. The innovation this year is that three of the night halts are used for two consecutive nights thus making service and baggage arrangements a lot less complicated. The Safari starts on Saturday, November 24th after two days of documentation, scrutineering and parties, with a ceremonial late afternoon start in downtown Mombasa in the shade of the crossed tusks on Moi Avenue. The following morning the rally proper starts from Rally HQ out at Diani Beach and runs through the day up to the first night halt in Nairobi, capital of Kenya.
The second day takes the crews to Naivasha down on the floor of the Great Rift Valley in a beautiful setting next to its own spectacular lake and squeezed between the Aberdare Mountains and the Mau Escarpment. The third leg is a loop out and back to Naivasha with all that the Kerio Valley and the Elgeyo Escarpment have to offer in the way of testing rally roads. The fourth day takes the rally south of Nairobi across the Kedong Valley and the Kapiti Plains with their fast but deceptive tracks deep into the Masai Amboseli Reserve and two nights in one of Amboseli’s spectacular lodges. The fifth day is a “rest”day where those that have no work can explore the game park or soak up the sun. Those whose cars need attention may have to forego some of that but will be relieved to find that this year the organisers have removed the possibility to work all night on cars with problems. At the end of each leg, there will be four hours of servicing allowed before the cars go into a closed park while at Amboseli on the rest day, cars will only be released for a “normal working day” from 8:00am to 5:00pm.
When rallying starts again with the fifth leg, the route goes east towards the Chulu Hills and Tsavo West National Park with the night halt in the Taita Hills Lodge. The sixth day heads back west and into Tanzania to the area around Mount Kilimanjaro before taking a night halt in Arusha. Once again, there is a daytime loop out from Arusha west towards the fabled Lake Manyara and its lions that sleep in the trees, then up the Mbulu Escarpment and back to Arusha. The final and eighth day of competition includes sections from old Safari routes round the Pare Hills and the infamous Usumbara Mountains before crossing back into Kenya and the finish at Diani Beach on the afternoon of Monday, December 3rd. The cars and crews crossing the finish line will have covered 4,500 km (2,800 miles) of East African motoring plentifully interspersed with competitive sections but the prize giving party is still likely to go on until dawn with the Indian Ocean singing the victor’s paean in the background.


» Pressrelease från Safarirallyt, www.eastafricansafarirally.com.

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