To all of our adventure oriented friends, The Dakar rally - eagerly awaited by the world; and especially by 20 anxious RawHyde Adventurers is nearly at hand.   Over the next two and a half weeks we'll be updating you all as much as we can from Argentina and Chile as we follow the worlds greatest motorsports event.  What "Mt. Everest" is to mountain climbers... The Dakar is to motorsports enthusiasts. its simply the "Ultimate" thing to do....   We are thrilled to be here and we hope you'll enjoy coming along for the ride. Five members of Team RawHyde are now in Argentina and more are arriving daily. The RawHyde "Advance crew"  has been in country for the last 3 days and have been involved in staggering amounts of paperwork and bureaucracy and delays and B.S. As many of you know we have shipped our own support truck from California to Buenos Aires - and the process of doing so has been a collosal pain in the butt.  We learned today that although the truck has arrived in Buenos Aires area, its still in the ship... and the ship is anchored in the Rio Platte (two miles away)  and won't be brought to the pier for another three or four days.  It's a frustrating delay but certainly not the end of the world. We have spent the last two days working with the freight forwarder, customs broker, shipping line, and other bureaucrats to try and get our truck "off the boat".   We are learning that the word "Adventure" can have many definitions, and one of them is dealing with Customs agents" in a foreign country.  Anyway more on that later. In the few idle hours that have been available to us we've prowled the streets of Buenos Aires checking out the preparations for Dakar which are happening all over town.  The picture above shows the construction of the starting podium over which all of the competitors will ride on the morning of January 1st.    More on the pomp and circumstance later as well. Now for a quick change of topic - the title of this e-mail is "preparing for adventure" and the crew has been talking among themselves about how our packing lists have changed in just the last few years.  It used to be that leaving on an "adventure" required precious little.  We would bring clothes, maps, guide book, camera & film.  That was about all we used to need.  Now  it seems that our electronics outweigh all the rest of our gear combined.  One member of our party (a man and wife) admit that between them they have 27 pounds of clothing and 32 pounds of electronics. The photo at the very bottom of this e-mail shows the collection of electronics that just one other member of the crew (Kevan) and I have brought with us.  Computers, GPS units, Short Wave radios, video cameras, ipods, ipads, iphones etc etc - not to mention all the chargers for these devices....  funny how things we didn't even know about a few years ago are now indispensable parts of our adventures. One note... we have radios for some of our crew in this photo... OK -   You'll hear from us soon...  till then Happy New Year. Jim Hyde