AY1819 Secondary 1 camp
Yuen Lok Sum Sherrie S1L
An activity that played around with our limits, making us scream with both happiness and disgust, the S1 camp would easily pass as one of the most memorable moments in this academic year.
On the morning of the 24th of October, everyone bustled about with friends excited for camp, some were talking about the hike to the campsite, some were complaining about their groups and some were just clustered together chatting. Finally, when we gathered in our groups, everyone seemed to quieten down a bit. While the groups were not what everyone would have wanted to be in, but we still had to stick with it. On the 25th and the 26th October, we had fully packed activities that were amazingly fun and yet they made us work together cooperatively.
When I reflect on this camp, the most memorable part is the most painful moment of camp, hiking up that hill back to where the buses were. I had packed light, well, somewhat light, ready for the painful hike. However, I really felt that this was a huge challenge and kept thinking that I would break one of my bones taking that huge backpack up that hill. Along the way, I met up with one of my friends and we walked together, going past people looking half dead and resting on their backpacks with their mouths hanging open and beads of sweat running down their faces like a river. However, we eventually finished the hike and slowly regained our energy from the excited chattering about going home to take a nice, long shower.
Some of the activities I enjoyed most were surfing, the team building activities on the first day and the canyon challenge. I had never touched a surfboard in my entire life, so I was pretty nervous before we did the surfing, like the feeling you would always get when you felt like everyone except you knew something. However, it turned out that we were not surfing, only body boarding, and it was like a huge boulder in my heart lifted, I felt so relieved. Bodyboarding was so fun. I felt so accomplished and proud of myself when I had ridden the waves all the way to the shore. I also really enjoyed the team building activities, our team won both activities! For the first activity, digging a hole underneath the paddle, it took a lot of screaming and shouting to get things right, but in the end, we completed the task first, and in the second activity, making a line all the way to a bottle/oxygen tank with a permanent connection to the paddle/space station was a really fun activity. I bet everyone felt stretched but making themselves as long as possible to make us closer to the bottle in the end, when my friend and I tied daypacks in our place and hurried over to help that we got to the bottle. It was a great achievement for all of us. The canyon challenge was a little different, because every little move you made contributed to the success or failure of having to slide down the slackline and raise your hands for 10 seconds with 4 other people on the same slackline, it was a great and satisfying activity.
