Thursday, October 18, 2007
ahhh finally back from ACE camp!!! Labels: ACE camp
4 days Adventure Camp Expedition camp has made me realise 1 thing-
stop taking my home and comforts for granted.
The classes going for camp 1 were sorted into different groups last week. the groups that i can remember going were HP, SOLID, TABA, SOZ, and my class group, SD. We are them split into sub groups based on our index numbers.
sub group 1(SD1): 1-11
sub group 2(SD2): 12-24(my group!)
sub group 3 (SD3): 25-36
DAY1
Building our tent should have been easy, but we got a small tent and long poles, so we snapped 2 poles before we changed tents. Then we found out that the next tent had no slots to put its 'skeleton' poles, so we discarded that 1 oso. We finally settled on a white one, but by that time there were little poles left when we snapped another 1, so we had to compromise by useing a half broken pole.
around 1pm, the camp went to hell on an express elevator.
it started as a small drizzle, but quickly grew into a drenching downpour that left us soaking wet even though we pressed our backs against the shelter's wall.
thats how wet it was.
Needless to say, we couldnt go mountain climbing.
all the groups couldn't do their activities on that day.
the rain finally stopped at around 3pm, and then we were all sent to go repair our tents, which were just put up be4 the rain.
most of the tents were mini swimming pools by that time. Luckily, we all had waterproofed our belongings with ziploc and thrash bags.
thenb at night, we went to sleep in a quite damp tent. it was quite uncomfortable...and at 3am, joel woke me up and asked me to go to the toilet with him. It was a rule that if we wanted to go toilet at night, we had to go with a partner...and the rest of the tent refused to go with him.
When i got back, i went to sleep at least 10 cm away from joel. And when i woke up, i found that i was 3 cm away from him. weird.
DAY 2
You know, on day 1 we were so cold we wanted the sun to come out and burn us...well we got our wish on day 2.
our first activity was abseiling. It was quite fun, and so was the team bonding activity, where we had to learn to trust our class. It involved letting them carry u and sing a song of your choice. The songs sung ranged from Barney to Spongebob to pop.
The weather by that time gave us sunburn on un-sunblocked area, like the abck of the neck, which most of us forgot to sunblock. It was so hot I wanted it to rain or hav cold winds to cool us down...as the saying goes, becareful for what u wish for...
After lunch, 2 people came to sit on out tent, and that was enough. The half broken pole snapped, and we had to work fast to repair it. We had just repaired it and was about to put the weather protecting sheet over it when we had to go for canoeing. We thought it wouldn't rain, for it was a cloudless sky...we went as far as to put our wet bags out to dry.
During canoeing, most of us forgot our sec1 skills. So there were quite a number of boats bumping into each other. And i got my wish. It did start to rain...
at 4 pm, i noticed a huge thundercloud in the horizon. and then it rained with an intensity similar to the first day. me and my partner paddled backt o shorre for we thought the teacher would cancel the canoeing. We were wrong. we had to raft up in the face of the downpour(as if we weren't wet enough) and I was chosen to do the capsize drill. Yup, get more cold. Fortunatly i was saved by the lightning. when the teacher h4eard the thunder and saw the flash of lightning, he caceled the canoeing. but not until we all looked like we jumped into a swimming pool for 5 minutes.
At least howard fixed the tent up properly, so it was okay, although the bags we left out to dry were now wet again, and the inside of our tent resembled a swimming pool. But 1 other tent collapsed, so we had to take in 1 of the inhabitants. so it was 7 people instead of 6, and that night we were packed together closer than a pack of sardines.
DAY 3
Jungle survival and oreinteering.
Jungle survival was basically making a shelter, a fire, and a water purification system. The instructors found a new way to torture us by inventing the hornet drill. when they scream 'HORNET' we have to fly flat on the ground, and cover our necks in case the hornet stings there. its very tiring, and we had to hornet 2 or 3 times in the jungle survival activity. It wasnt very eventful. My main job was to collect firewood and find the darn lime tree, which i searched in the wrong place.
Then, we did outdoor cooking for lunch. I never knew Joey was such a good cook. His eggs were delicious! a pity I only got quite little, for SOMEONE went to go take half of all the food after it was cooked.
Then it was oreinteering, which is sort of like a treasure hunt, only we have to get stamps on out card instead of treasure, and then run back to the starting point. The prize was the rights to water bomb anyone.and in the end it was joey who led us to victory, as he had done this before. After a few wrong turns, we then raced the group to the last stamp, and then raced back to the starting point.
At the end of the day, there was the campfire, which we learnt some unspeakable songs and then where each of the groups had to perform a act. There were some really great ones, like "the chronicles of TABA" and a imitation of a mocca advertisment.
DAY 4
This was the day that we could go home. Everybody was excited, but there was one last activity left for us to complete-rafting, reputed to be the worst of all the activities.
We 1st learnt hwo to knot stuff and other things(boring). then we started building a raft. All the 3 groups rafts were the same in design, and all fell apart when they were pushed into the water. Talk about similarity. Thats what I heard though, not saw, for before we launched our rafts, we had to play a small game suited for our instructors sadistic minds.
The game was as follows- we started from a cage on the other side of a road, and then we would attempt to run back to our rafts through a muddy field. What we didn't know was that the instructor would make us do a hornet drill halfway through the mud. I foresaw this, and ran as slowly as i could, which means i avoided getting muddy the FIRST time. The instructor noticed, and purposely did another hornet drill when i was in the middle of the field, then as i didn't cover my neck properly, he said i would have died, and told me i couldn't move. So then my group was suppissed to transport me to the other side of the river useing the raft, but as i mentioned, the raft broke apart when it hit the water.
Then, it was river crossing, which was kind of fun, as it was a hot day and the water was cool, and it helped wash off some of the dirt. After the activity was over, Mr chua then let us go to the lake and wash ourselves before returning to the campsite. Good ol Mr chua.
thats basically it for ACE camp.
fire and ice clashed at [7:20 AM]