Hi, this is Pat Norwil with the Crocodile Trophy. The road to Kuranda is flat, wide, and a headwind. It's typically littered with dead kangaroos, or dead tires. The roads are pretty brutal here, and lots of kangaroos get hit everyday, so about every two kilometers there's usually a dead, bloated kangaroo that's stinking up the side of the road there to greet me.

Today's stage was from Minnamoolka to Mareeba, and it was pretty interesting. The most technical stage we've done, like I said earlier, but I just had dinner with some of the athletes, and you know, people all said it was brutally hard, but there's also this kind of youthful energy going around the restaurant tonight over dinner. Guys like Rasmussen and Adam were just giggling with the joy of how they were able to overcome fears of technical riding, and talked, like, floating through obstacles, and were just amazed that they, with no energy left in them, they were still able to pull the granny-gear hills and continue on. Some people were a little more frustrated; one of the riders was almost hit tonight by a lorrie or a semi-truck on his way in, in the dark, and walked in and just unloaded on Gerhard Schönbacher, the race organizer, who, you know, typical race promoter, just shrugged his shoulders and said "Ahh, you should've brought a light."

But for other guys like Douglas Hooft, 51, this is probably the most technical riding he's ever done in his life, on a 15-year-old Giant bike (he goes around saying they built the bike that's going to bring down Giant because his hasn't broken in 15 years), he was...staggered into the restaurant, still in his riding clothes, completely dusty and baked out of his mind, and happy, and just full of life.

So it's been an evolution for a lot of these guys; we've gone from flat, boring, uninteresting roads into these mountains now, and people are feeling fit, and are surprising themselves. Basically, some are surprising themselves more than others, but, it's good. Most people are happy that the stage is over. You know, some guys took some pretty bad crashes; I was just talking to Rudy from Belgium, and he was unconscious off the side of the trail for, he figures, about 15 minutes after he went over the handlebars, and then when he woke up, he continued to drive his bike, and realized that he didn't have any water bottles left, and they'd flown off his bike, and he drove the 25 kilometers to the next water stop, and he was pretty baked. A lot of guys are kicking back, enjoying a cold beer after three days of being in the Outback, of drinking warm beer and washing ourselves in shin-deep, bathing ourselves in shin-deep water in the rivers. So it's good.

Jan Kopka from the Czech Republic is still amazing me. He finished second today in the stage, probably the hardest stage we've done, and Jan is a...he's a character. Every day we clean our bottles, and fill them up with the Powerade, and then put them in ice coolers, and they pour ice in them, and then they go out to the check points for us to get our re-supply. And everyday, he fills his water bottles, and puts a beer in every checkpoint, and when he gets there (I've usually been with him when he gets there) and he downs that beer in about two minutes, gets his water bottles, grabs a couple bananas, and a Powerbar, and he takes off and he says, "It's better to be a little drunk when you are doing this race" and I tend to agree with him. A cold beer at the end of a hard day is a good thing out here.

So tomorrow, we go back into the Outback, Mareeba to Karma Waters, and, hopefully, there's some Karmic energies in the waters to heal some of these sore feelings towards Gerhard tomorrow. And then after that stage is what they consider the "King of the Hill." And it's the hardest stage. It's the Karma Waters to Laura, 166 kilometers, and lots of climbing. Very gnarly. It's an old mining trail out to this old china mine. It should be quite interesting; I'm looking forward to it.

We're into our...tomorrow will be the start of our 11th stage, and we've got three more to go, so, I'll touch bases with you in a couple days. That's it.

— Pat Norwil, MountainZone.com Correspondent