I actually arrived back on Friday and was going to post this earlier, but the development on Blender 2.5 caught my eye, so here is the delayed post.
Last week almost nothing happened due to me spending Monday through Friday deep in the jungles of Taman Negara. This is part of a little something called the Duke of Edinburgh Award, AKA nowadays as The International Award. I am currently at Gold level and to complete it I am required to do a year’s worth of a skill-based activity, physical-based activity and community-service orientated activity as well as a week spent away from family and friends learning a foreign culture and participating in some self improvement activity. Oh, I forgot something. That’s right, a good deal of time doing “camps”.
A camp is where you get thrown into a jungle with a 20kg backpack holding everything you survive on: food, water, tent, sleeping bag, clothes, etc. Anybody who have participated in one of these can tell you it’s a good deal more than a walk in the park. You are made to trek a good many hours and kilometers per day, sometimes carrying your full gear (20kg or so). The European outdoors also probably feature a lot cleaner grass and sunny areas to do an all-day trek in, but Malaysia seems to love exhibiting countless leeches, polluted rivers, icky forest dwellers and not to mention the vast array of thorny undergrowth ready to stab you.
Last week’s camp highlights included:
- A 5 hour bus journey
- A brown river that served as a shower
- A survival day where:
- You had to only eat tapioca you cooked yourself.
- You had to make your own fire (no matches, stove, whatever, just with sticks)
- You had to drink water boiled from the river.
- You had to build a shelter to spend the night in (from palm leaves and sticks)
- A provided-for barbeque
- The “giving back to nature” ceremony being performed (not very enthusiastically) a couple times in the forest.
- Another 5 hour bus journey.
All in all, it’s been post-worthy enough.
Here I am back in civilisation along with several nasty wounds around my ankle (leeches), two large Domino’s pizza, and a glass of fresh orange juice. There is one more week of school before the holidays start, so I also smell some interesting new updates brewing.
Not very picture-friendly for a camp, eh? I think somebody who went on it with us snapped some photos along the way so if I do grab hold of them I’ll dedicate another post to broadcasting them.
Upon some self reflection this was an utterly boring post. Here are your 5 minutes back.
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