South Africa - R.C Crawlers

It is a continuous battle for anyone with any interest in South Africa, to find the people around them who are equally interested in things. For (hobby-grade, not the iphone mini-toy crap) radio controlled, we are a bit more spoiled, the offroad tracks are few and far between, but bustling and thriving. The road racers have frequent get-togethers(gtg). The helicopters guys meet at places like the velodrome in Bellville, and the fixed wing fanatics have their spots (albeit constantly plagued by ever growing neighbourhoods who take claims against noise and safety, even though they weren't there first; read: a bunch of idiots).

For the offroad section though, there are sub-sections, sub cultures. Many offroad guys tend to do a little of both, but track racing isn't everyones cup of tea(it sure isn't mine, boring as hell) and bashers don't really get together that often (they should, we have excellent veld-en-berg areas).

This brings me to the crawlers. To get an idea of "crawling", first have a look at some of these:
http://vimeo.com/9153820
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE4_P3P5BKY&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k9qilCO0mM (more trailing than crawling)


The hardest kind of people to find, are the crawler people. There are no clubs (that I know of) and no tracks (because we don't want tracks, we have rocks on mountains and beaches). Asking around the model shops, I hear that several crawlers are sold per month, so where are these people?

Well, a guy in my area (Gordons Bay) decided to start a blog (like this one) to try and get people's attention. A few days later, he rigged us up with a forum and our very own domain! http://www.sarccrawlers.co.za/

This gives us (as far as I can tell) the first crawler zone from where we can now proceed to build a community, organise get-togethers, share locations, discuss local and international suppliers and perhaps just about anything else surrounding the topic of r/c crawling.

At the time of writing this, the forum is barely a week old, and only has a few members. It will takes months, maybe a year to build a name and promote it; not to mention gathering all the people out there who also think they are alone. The best we can do now, is to spread the word, post a lot, check in daily or at least every few days and tell your local shops to add a notice on the wall. Tell your friends, tell your uncle, and if you don't have a crawler, research and develop one (or buy one) :)

Hope to see you all
Marlon