This year for DP Orientation, our grade went to Borderlands, Kithulgala, for three days full of bonding, making memories and taking risks. Although I did enjoy my time there, I’m very, VERY  glad it wasn’t five days long, like the last time I visited Borderlands for my 9th grade Week Without walls (five days in the wilderness, surrounded by leeches was a bit much in my opinion😅). I am very grateful for the time that I had with my classmates though, as I was able to become closer to many of my friends, reconnect with old ones, as well as getting to know the new classmates in my class away from a school setting.

One of the most important things that I took away from the trip was the amount of metaphors the river could teach us. On the first day of the trip, we went canyoning and then we went water Rafting. One of the things that the instructors said that stuck with me was how we always have to look forward in the river, and never look back because it won’t help us with what we have to do going forward. I thought this is a really impactful statement that we can apply to life, because if we  always look to the past, we can never look forward and see what we want for ourselves in the future.  The first thing we did when we arrived was get into group for canyoning. During canyoning, I bonded with everyone in my group about topics like books, movies and music. After that, we went water rafting which was much more fun than 9th grade. If I have to be honest, 9th grade rafting was definitely underwhelming, and severely anti climatic as there was only one *tiny* drop which was really sad. BUT this year we started my farther up the river, and we timed it with the damn opening, so the water was much faster. We learnt about the different water currents and how the river moved and how to anticipate it, as well as t the different levels of severity of each drop, from one to five, and five being Niagara Falls. My group did very well for talking to each other and working collaboratively, and I remember one particularly funny moment went we had almost fallen out of the boat from a pretty severe drop, and we had asked the guide what level it was. He said it was a 2, and we still had to do the level 3 which shocked us all a lot. It was a lot of fun especially when we started splash wars with other boats with strangers, as well as classmates, and we started to jump out of the boats and drift down the river.

My proudest moment on the trip was jumping off the 10 -metre cliff. I wasn’t that scared, and this was mostly because of my classmates. It was amazing, every single person did the jump, and I can say that if I was there without the support of my classmates, I wouldn’t have done it at all. Apparently, we were the only class in history where every single student decided to do the jump. Other than that, the food was AMAZING, so good that I usually went back for seconds after every meal. We also celebrated two birthdays, and the overall vibes were really nice as we were all playing cards, football and different games together.

Another thing I forgot to mention: our football games was one of the funnest I had probably ever played, with two shoes for each goal and 7 in a team, it was so fun to play on the sand (even if one on my friends injured her foot by hitting the floor instead of the ball🥲) and dodge the trees and swings to get to the goal. (even though my team lost, it was still super fun). The highlight of the end of each day was the river bath, where we would just jump our grimy, sweaty selves into the nice cold river, and pull each other/tackle everyone into the water (thankfully no one drifted down the river to Colombo, which is what the guides told us would happen if we somehow drifted past them😅).

All in all, this was a truly amazing experience that not only taught me about my friends, but a lot about my self and the limits that I could push myself to, as well as going with the flow, just like the river 🙂