When the day had come for the Te Wera camp day, I got dressed and got all my stuff together.
I went down to the mailbox to wait for the bus, then when the bus was coming it just went straight past. So I didn’t go on the bus, instead I went with Will, Maddy’s Dad, which was way better.
When I finally got to Te Wera I went to go play on the adventure playground with the other kids, then they called us in dining area to tell us the boundaries, what we’re doing and all the rules.
The first activity I was doing was river study with Mr Archer. When we were at the stream across the road there they put us in to groups of four. I was with Justin, Shane and Pete. They gave us a sieve, a scrubbing brush, a tray and a clipboard, the first thing we had to do was half fill up this tray with the water in the stream, then someone would take the sieve down to the stream and get the scrubbing brush and brush the side of the bank in the water and then you would of court some bugs. One group had caught quite a big fresh water crayfish and another group caught a tiny crayfish.
We went back to the camp site to have some lunch and a play around and went to our next activity was team building and archery. They spilt us up in two groups and my group had team building and the other half would go over to the archery and then when 50 minutes was up we would swap over.
In the team building we had this wall we had to climb up. It had nothing to help you up with; it was just a 180 degree wall. The only way to get up was lifting one of group member onto the wall platform and we weren’t allowed to use the corners to help you. We got the whole team on the platform, well not exactly the whole team, because we couldn’t get the very last person onto the platform, but it still was fun to do. So we gave that up and went over to a balancing board. This one you have to get all the members of the two teams on the board with out the board touching the ground. That was quit easy. Then we went over to this big pole sticking in the ground and this tier that you had to get over the top of the pole and back over. And again that was quit easy and very fun to do.
The 50 minutes was past, so we went over to the archery. The archery was a little bit fun, but I wouldn’t say it was the best. I’m not lying, but the archery was harder than it looks! I nearly got bull’s-eye. We had to get in pairs and we only got one arrow per pair and it took quite a while because lots of arrows went past the board and got stack in the bank behind it. And when that was over we all went home.
On Tuesday the whole day we were doing was going in the bush with Bushman Bob, making bivvies and walking up a hill.
Bushman Bob told us a story about a aeroplane crashed in the bush and the person who was in the plane crash had to make a bivvy before it got dark, so he told us to imagine that person was you and we have to make some bivvies before it got dark just like the story, plus we had to imagine that it was going to be dark in half an hour. We had to walk to the bush when the little kids got to go on the trailer being pulled by a motorbike. I’d say it was the best thing we did in the bush. Bushman Bob gave us two pieces of string and a big sheet of black plastic. Then Bushman Bob said go. We went straight to gathering sticks and ferns, we set the frame up and put the plastic over the top as the roof. We put the ferns inside of it for the bed and some for the walls then the time was up and we went to see all the other huts. We had three groups and the first group we saw had the score of 7 out of 10 plus he was testing if it’s a water proof hut and if it can stay up in high winds the whole group had to sit inside it and see if its good or not, my one had 6 out of 10 and the last one had 8 and a half out of 10. My group had the poorest score sadly, but then Bushman Bob told us the right way to make them. He told us how you can know where north and south is just by using a watch or by the moss on the trees around you.
We had lunch in the bush and then the worst bit of all was climbing up this massive hill, when we finally got to the top we had a drink and we carried on up the track back in the bush. We stopped at the track intersected.
He went in the bush and got this plant that I can’t remember its name. Bushman Bob cut pieces of it off and most of the kids including me had a taste. It tasted gross! It was all gooey and slimy, it tasted like raw potato. Some of the kids even liked it! Then we went all the way down the hill and back to the camp and we went back home.