The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award is an award students can work toward. It includes a number of different criteria, including an adventure component. If only it was that easy! People seem to overlook that it includes a strenuous hike over a period of four days while carrying our lives on our backs in sub-zero temperatures.
As we got prepared to leave the house I made a Facetime call back home to South Africa that I was sure would be my last. As I picked up my backpack, I stumbled a bit simply trying to get it to the car. One thought was going through my mind: how am I going to survive this? We arrived at school barely managing to walk with our backpacks. We were confronted with everybody telling us scary stories about what lay ahead. We packed everything on the bus. You’d swear that we were moving up north with the amount of stuff we had, not to mention the quantity of food that could feed Africa. The bus ride was pleasant but I will later wish that I appreciated the warmness and the feeling of dry socks more. The bus stopped at a place that looked exactly like the summer camps I’ve seen on TV; almost like the movie Camp Rock with the Jonas brothers.
We made dinner the first night, a very deceiving dish called chili which was a bean and meat sauce type thing that we just had to heat up with some salad and chips on the side. Cleaning our plates was an entirely new experience. Our camp counselor Dan said we should place some dirt in our bowl and scrape all the food out. I thought he was joking but a few minutes later we were on the ground and scooping dirt into our bowls. Yummy right! One of the highlights was the night walk we did. The night walk was without flashes lights, just our eyes and the dark night spotted with stars. At first I felt very disorientated: we had to trust our feet and senses like never before. Tripping, being slapped in the face and poked in the eye with twigs became a normal thing. Never mind the slush that started to accumulate at the bottom of my shoes from falling through a badly built beaver dam that we had to cross. Once we were finally back at our campsite we made s’mores and were off to bed after the first day of our adventure.
When we woke up that Saturday morning we had no idea what time it was because we had handed in our watches to the teachers as part of the experience. I could feel the frosty tinge in the air that I recognized from the few ski trips I’ve been on. I peered out of the tent and saw the most magical site, snow! I suddenly felt as if I was totally unprepared for this. Peering out at the snow was possibly the driest I would be the entire trip. We headed to the main camp, which was a huge log type cabin right next to the beautiful lake that was now slightly frosted over with snow. We left our useless equipment and headed out for what turned into a five-hour hike thanks to Dan not quite knowing where he was going. This guy reminded me of a mad Bear Grills. We walked with our heavy packs through forests and over snow-covered logs. It was truly quite painful. We had to keep up our water intake and keep thermo regulating so that we didn’t sweat and then freeze. It snowed and then rained and then snowed some more for most of the day. We stopped for lunch in a small clearing in an area that looked like a fairytale. With the snow and pine trees surrounding us, our sandwiches were very far from a fairytale though. Everyone’s feet were soaked; pretty much everything of mine was soaked including most of my clothes and parts of my sleeping bag. This trip took a turn for an episode on Bear Grills. Wet and cold, they started the fire in the tepee. This fire literally saved lives. We started defrosting our iced toes along with most of our clothing. Our dinner consisted of roasting hot dogs over the fire and some thing that resembled a bun. If you wanted you could also add mustard or tomato sauce—or as Canadians would say “ketchup”—which I had to carry for what felt like eternity during the hike.
On our last morning we woke up to the sound of rain hitting our tent. I put on my wet socks; yes, wet socks, that’s what life had come to. We went on a beautiful hike without our backpacks, which was actually quite a relief. The walk to and back from the beautiful waterfall was enjoyable. We were all freezing but good friends. Laughs and some good jokes kept us going.
Being South African and not accustomed to -10oC weather, I wore about six layers on my top and about three on my bottom, basically looking like a snowman. That night we took an almost solitary walk without any light source. This all sounds very serine and peaceful until you have to find a partner making an animal noise in the woods. We all cheered up knowing that we were heading home and that in a couple of hours a warm shower and our beds awaited us. Before that became reality we had a few team-building courses to do, which included trust exercises, a huge ball maze controlled by the whole group, and a two-metre wall we had to get over only using one another. I think we were all glowing and it wasn’t because we were in a bright yellow bus. We could see the signs of civilization. The song I’m a survivor played in the back of my head. When we turned the corner and looked up Royal Avenue at LCC, who knew I would be so excited to see a school!
Overall, Duke of Ed was an incredible experience. The friends we made, the memories we created and the laughs we shared outweigh the cold and shear wetness we experienced. Thank you to Mr. Weiland and Ms. Comley for leading us on this trip. To everyone with whom I shared this unbelievable experience, thank you for the good times and memories. We are survivors! —Carmen Debeer (exchange student from St. Stithians Girls College, South Africa)