By Alex Schumann, 10B

After a quick “Hi” to our classmates, we settled down and prepared ourselves for the first lecture.  Starting off with a short introduction, we covered all the general points of camping in the wild. Half an hour later all the campers were on their way to the primary football pitch, which was where we would be spending the night. My tent partner Chloe and I were one of the first to have our tent up, which was mainly due to the fact that we had one of Decathlon’s 2 minute tents, but it was quite amusing watching the others with their conventional tents stare at the pile on poles and canvas at their feet, with blank looks on their faces.

Once all the tents were up, we returned to our classroom for further one and a half hours of lectures.  By 8pm half of us were falling asleep, so the teachers decided to be merciful and finally let us set off to our tents and have our dinner. This was one my favourite parts of the whole event, because our group had a great time joking around and nibbling on our luxurious dinner of veggies & dip, pasta and marshmallows. Sadly we only had 25 minutes to eat, so we were soon on our way back to the classroom.

We were saved from another lecture by escaping into the gym, where we would be doing some team-building activities. These were quite fun, although half of us were exhausted after the long week of work, and were dying to finally get to our tents and crawl into our sleeping bags. At 9 pm our wish was granted and we stumbled only half awake to our tents. By 9.30 everyone had finally settled and by 10 o’clock it was time for (torch) lights out. This wasn’t quite the case, as it took nearly an hour to get everyone quiet, but by 11pm I was happily dreaming.

Morning dawned far too early and slowly, one after another, the sleepy campers emerged from their tents. By 7.30am just about everyone was up and dressed and ready to start a day of trekking, packing, and, of course, more lectures. Although putting up the tents had been quite fun the night before, we were soon to learn that putting up a tent and taking it down, are two very different things, and unfortunately we weren’t quite as enthusiastic about yanking poles out of the ground and shaking rain off tent roofs. The minutes started ticking by and an hour later we were still busy packing together our belongings.

At 9am we were finally ready to start the day’s activities. We started off with a few mini-games in the gym and moved on to learning how to use a compass and read maps. This was most likely the most challenging part of the weekend, because most of us had no clue how to use a compass, let alone how to navigate our group through the wilderness of China. To practise, we were sent outside to test our navigation skills around the school complex where we were told to find different pots filled with coloured pens. We had to work around obstacles (even though I highly doubt that we’ll be coming across a group of wild year 4s having a football game when we’re on our trek, but you never know), and find our way from one place to another using only a compass, directions and our ability to ask other teams where they had found pots already, to finish the task.

After what seemed like eternity, we had finally found all the pots, and were free to go home. I have to say, it was as relief to walk through the door, collapse onto my bed and feel the softness of the comfy mattress below me, but I’d be lying if I said that the weekend hadn’t been a success, and that Iwasn’t considerably smarter than I had been 24 hour earlier. I feel that I’m ready now to face the wild, with only a tent and compass.