Our final day of our DP 1 orientation. We had so much fun together that it was sad for it all to end. In the morning we commenced with our wake up stretches and did some team building and reaction time games. Our first game was paddle drop, in which we dropped the paddle in front of the other person, who had to grab it before it fell to the floor. It caused for a lot of shouting as people vocalized their dissatisfaction at losing.

We then moved onto something with the entire grade which was the wire drop. We all had to hold a long wire with our fingers supporting it and lower it to the floor. This proved to be more challenging then we thought. When we squatted to bring it down to the floor, some people kept their arms in the air causing the wire to curve and almost fall off on several occasions. We decided to assign a team captain so that they could instruct us when to go down and ensure we had our hands at the same level. We chose Matthew to take on this role and he got us to go down in increments. After lots of arguing over who wasn’t going down and the wire not even touching the most of us on several occasions, we finally managed to lay the wire flat on the ground and a celebration was due.

After our morning warm up, we set off in the buses to the trail to hike up to the cave (which we temporarily dubbed Plato’s cave for the sake of our TOK class). We then hiked up the road and into a dense jungle filled with leeches which got lots of screams from the group when they were discovered upon us. We reached the first cave, where we found the ground plan for a house. The guide told us how here they had found human remains, pots, weapons and other domestic products proving people had lived here many years ago. There was also a small building that still stood erect for monks to lead religious speeches.

We then hiked a bit further to another cave under a waterfall, which was darker and perfect for our Plato’s cave experience. We separated into our TOK classes with one class first seeing which shapes they could see in our shadow puppets before switching over. It was cool to see how warped the images could become not only because of the shadows, but also because of the surface of the cave walls.

We explored the cave a bit more (had to lecture Mr Lockwood on why he couldn’t shine his torch to the top of the cave, for anyone wondering its so you don’t disturb the bats like he already did and disorientate them🦇) and found a lizard skulking about and some monitor lizard eggs (but only the shells). It was mind blowing how the eggs started off so small but to think that within an year they could grow to become several metres long.

We did a reflection of what we saw once we came out of the cave and how much more our eyes took in after seeing barely anything (220925_016). We were more aware of the details that nature held and the beauty of it all. We then went back to the main cave just before a downpour. We sheltered in the cave but at some point decided that if we didn’t go down now we would get into worse weather so we took the liberty of getting wet. We hiked back down the road to the buses and headed back to camp for our last lunch together before packing our bags and heading back to Colombo.

This trip was one of the best experiences I have had. Especially getting closer to the grade. It has brought our grade closer together and formed stronger bonds.

(Cover Image Credit: Mr Lockwood)