The Grade 9 camp and the Orange River

On Tuesday 27 September I went on a ninth grade camp, it was a 75 minutes drive from Cape Town. The campsite where we were staying was called “back to base camp”, and indeed it was back to the basics, it was like a military camp. Sleeping in tents, cold showers, and the students had to do push ups the entire time. My program was as follows: getting up at 7 o’ clock to make 600 slices of French toast. After breakfast the prefects and teachers had to accompany the morning program, I did football! When the morning program was finished we had to make lunch and serve it as well. Then we had the afternoon program with all kinds of exercises. At half past 6 we had to make and serve supper. After dinner we had a evening program, which was free time for me, but after 10 o’clock we had to patrol the campsite, looking for students out of their tents. When we found someone (we found a lot), they had to do push ups in their underwear. On Thursday we arrived back at the school at 12.00.

When I came back in the hostel, I was a little bit bored, because I was alone for a whole day and had nothing to do. I decided to go out for a walk. I was walking to a supermarket, but I didn’t make it. Some people asked me for money, which I didn’t give them. I told them that I had no money with me, but a tourist has always money so 3 people started to follow me. I was so scared that I ran back to the hostel.

On Friday I went back to my host family, were I had 2 lovely days and on Sunday I went to the Orange River in Namibia. It was a trip of 8 hours and it made me very tired, because the day before I had a sweet 18 party and I slept only 3 hours that night. After a braai, I was a finally able to go to my bed, the next day would be my first day on the river.
The orange river was really amazing, sleeping under the stars, peddling over the river, rapids, hiking mountains (I hated that, although the view was very nice). Peter and I capsized twice, one time were we cut off, but the second time was our fault. The first part of the rapid went well, but then we were supposed to steer our boat to 11 o’clock. We steered our boat to 1 o’ clock and that was our mistake, which made us capsize and everything fell into the water. (I even lost my hat!)











In my next blog I will write about the things I do at school and during the week!