Day 1

The first day was great. We started by rafting; going down rapids and hitting rocks all throughout the river which was very exhilarating and a great change of pace from sitting in a cramped bus for 3 hours. I actually fell off the raft one time while going down a rapid but I was quickly saved by the supervisor. It was a very fun time, though the other teams would regularly splash water at us when we were in close proximity which did ruin my enjoyment a little. Afterwards we went hiking through the forest and found ourselves another river, but this time it was for canyoning. The canyoning sections were a bit scary at the beginning because the supervisor repeatedly emphasized how dangerous canyoning was in a speech just before and the first thing you have to do is avoid breaking your legs by jumping over the rocks, but after a while you realize it’s not as dangerous as the supervisor made it out to be (jumping over the rocks was the most dangerous thing we did). It was fun, jumping down into ponds and sliding down rocks but since there were lots of people in our group, we had to do each maneuver one at a time and waiting for the others to go until it’s your turn is very uneventful, though I suppose it’s inevitable.

Us being educated on how to canyon

Our final endeavor for the day was swimming all the way to camp from the river. I was not very keen of this task because the water was very cold, but despite the cold it was actually much more enjoyable than I had imagined. It mostly entailed just floating because the waters were flowing towards the camp. We were on the home stretch on the river when the people ahead of me warned of shallow rocks, and to keep your body vertical while floating. I kept my body vertical but still grazed some rocks beneath me. After arriving at camp I went to my ‘room’ and quickly changed to dry clothes when I found a gruesome discovery; the pants I had been wearing were torn. I was thinking of when it might have been torn, during the day and I deciphered very quickly that it must have been when I grazed the rocks when floating to camp. I swore bloody revenge on the rocks before I spent the rest of the evening on camp eating dinner and talking with my friends. The accommodation was amazing. There were tons of gigantic bean bags to sit on and us students just hung out talking sitting on the bean bags the whole time. There was also a chess board which had a piece missing, and gigantic Jenga blocks to play big Jenga with. Overall a pretty good place to stay. The rooms were not bad either, having a comfy bed and pillow with a mosquito net over it to protect us but the biggest triumph was the bean bag exclusive to our room. No other room had a bean bag, strangely, and many people were jealous of our room. It wasn’t until I sorted through my stuff before sleeping that I realized my bottle was missing. I recalled that I had not used the bottle for the entirety of the day and realized it must have fell off the side of my bag when we were moving the bags out. It was too late to get my bottle at this time of day so I had to hopefully get it tomorrow.

Day 2

The second day started with some morning stretches and then immediately going out canyoning for the whole day. I consciously chose to go to the bus I went on yesterday to try find my water bottle, but I couldn’t find it anywhere I looked. Already a bad start but it would get much worse as the hike to the canyoning river was the worst part of the entire trip. We hiked through a dense forest filled with leeches and I for some reason thought it would be a good idea to wear long pants so that no leeches would get to me. This was a horrible idea as leeches will get to you regardless, and now you can’t even pull them out because your pants cover your entire legs. At the rest point I was able to get some leeches off my foot and knee joint by pulling up the sleeves of my pants, but some leeches got up higher than I could reach without taking off my pants, and I wasn’t going to take of my pants in front of the entire class so I just had to punch myself in the legs until they died, which probably didn’t work.

The blight of the leeches

After that disaster we finally got to the fun part, canyoning. I wasn’t really looking forward to canyoning because I really couldn’t stand cold waters, but the waters were not as cold as yesterday, thankfully. The maneuvers were more exciting with longer jumps, longer slides, more climbing, it really felt like the true canyoning experience unlike yesterday which was only a sneak peek of canyoning. At the end we had to do a very long jump down into the water. I moved myself to the back of the line because I was nervous, but when I jumped it was only 2 seconds long and I was disappointed afterwards. We quickly hiked back to the bus, and luckily this part of the forest had very little leeches and I wasn’t bit at all, and then we went back to camp. After refreshing, there was a competition set up for us students, where there was a giant ladder and a bell on the very top. The goal was, in a group of two, you had to work together to climb the giant ladder to ring the bell, the difficulty being that each of the rungs would get higher and higher every ascension and it would be almost impossible for a person to climb up all the way by themselves so you have to climb on top of each other and pull each other up to reach the bell. You were also hooked onto a rope so you don’t fall, but you weren’t allowed to hold the rope or any of the ropes holding up the rungs, otherwise it would be too easy. I was grouped with Eloise, and we were one of the last to go and with inspiration from the other groups we had something of a plan before actually going. I would hold out my knee for Eloise to climb up on and she would go to the next rung and then pull me up from below. Eloise was extremely good at climbing the rungs and was rushing me to go faster while I was very much struggling to get on even when being pulled up, but we somehow managed to be the fastest group going up. We won nothing by the way. It was exhilarating climbing the ladder as fast as humanly possible and the teamwork we achieved was the peak of my experience in the orientation trip. The rest of the day I was talking to my peers about my anime and manga while looking for my bottle at camp, thinking maybe someone brought it here somewhere. I could not find my bottle sadly.

Eloise climbing the ladder, and me just holding on

Day 3

The final day was very underwhelming, but starting from the good, we had more fun activities to do. The first activity was a challenge that involved the whole class holding up a very long rod with only their index fingers (also having to keep your index finger touching the rod) and to try and drop it to the ground as a group. This was extremely difficult without any coordination. The first two times we tried this we kept lifting the rod up instead of down because it was very hard to tell who was keeping it up as all of us had to keep touching the rod. The third (or maybe fourth?) time we tried this we had someone from our class having to coach us to lower the rod because we were so incompetent that we couldn’t do it ourselves. We eventually accomplished this and moved on to the next activity, which was another challenge which involved two people, one had to drop a stick at a random time and another had to catch it from above, testing their reaction speed. I was very good at this activity. Also, I finally found my water bottle. It was just laying on the seat in the second to last row. I had somehow missed it when I went to the bus yesterday, which made me look very foolish. And then for the not fun part, we went to the cave which was one of the low points of the trip. Getting to the cave was very annoying with an uphill climb in a forest full of leeches. By some miracle, I avoided all leeches and did not get bit once but the journey was still not great. The cave was very dull. I expected an actual cave, not a dent in a mountain. It was very small, and also there wasn’t much to do or look at besides some structure and a house that was abandoned. Then we went back to the bus to the camp and then after a while we went back to school.