Finding Neverland

Outward Bound Singapore

Last week, I went to an activity called OBS (Outward Bound Singapore). That was an extremely hard week for me. I will write down all things I experienced in OBS by writing journal.

02/07/07 Day 1

After hearing our seniors’ scary words, ‘cannot take shower’, ’kayaking damn tiring’, ‘bad living conditions’…, it seems I was a little afraid of OBS. But when we arrived there, OBS camp2, I thought it was not that bad. We all got into a team. My team’s name was ‘Columbus’, haha, we all know he was one of the best explorers in the world. Our instructor’s name was Jill. She was a young woman that had a short hair and very dark skin. After putting all our things inside our team’s store, we did two small activities. One was Trust Fall. As I expected, it was definitely the same as we did in ‘Bokala’ when I was in sec 3 in Jing Yan Middle School. Even the watchwords were the same! It was like:

‘Columbus, are you ready’ vs. ‘准备好了吗’

‘Columbus ready, Columbus fall’ vs. ‘准备好了’

Definitely the same…

Another activity was Belay Station. It was like climbing but we only climbed in a very short about 2-3 meters’ tube. When I did that, I thought it was very easy. However, I never expected that we will do that again and it was a real rock climbing… Climb a 10+ meters’ wall…

After those activities, we learnt to make out tent and cooked our dinner. That dinner was damn…damn…bad…half rare half overcooked… But we all had to eat…Fortunately, I didn’t feel bad the next day…

The night in the tent was not that good. Outside was very cool but inside was damn hot. But after a day’s activity, we all very tired and fell asleep very soon.

03/07/07 Day 2

I never know we had to wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning… When I was awake by my ‘tentmates’, I felt so baaaaaaaaaaad! The sky was still dark, but we had to walk down from our campsite to our store (our campsite was on a hill). We had to do PT in the morning and then ate our breakfast (it was bread, much better than yesterday’s dinner…). We packed all our staff into the bag they provided. Because we had to carry our cooking staff and our food, we two shared a bag and leave some bags for carrying food and cooking staff. For the guys they had to carry our tent (poor guys… especially Minh… He really carried a lot a lot!)… Those were all daaaaaaaamn heavy… But we had to carry our things to camp1 and do activities there. After a 15mins walk, we arrived at camp1. At the square, I saw our seniors. They all sat in a circle and did nothing (acc. What I saw…or just chatting…). And we just walk to here carrying our damn heavy bags. At that moment, I thought they were much fortunate than us…Luckily, we didn’t need to cook our own food… we ate our lunch and dinner in the canteen of camp1. When my seniors saw me, they said with a ‘jealous tune’: ‘how come you can eat in the canteen! You know we cooked our own food everyday last year!’ Hehe, I could only say that this showed we had a better condition than yours… but who knows what we’ll face tomorrow and the day after tomorrow??? You can never imagine… We did climb and kayak that day. They were still easy activities compared to the next two day… But kayak really sucks@_@! My whole body got wet and my shoes were full of sand…But when we asked Jill what were we going to do the next day, she gave us a very mystic smile and said ’you will know tomorrow…’ and then she said ’now I’m going to tell you a story…’ we all fainted… She told our stories on each day and they all were so lame…

04-05/07/07 Day 3-4

The HARDEST two days…

We only did ONE activity each day, but you can never imagine how hard and tiring that activity was… After those two days, I could understand Jill’s ‘mystic smile‘…

Actually I really really don’t want to write down these two days’ experiences because I think the article will be super long… so I just talk about them briefly…

My miserable life…!

On day 3, we did track. You cannot imagine carry a 10+kg bag on your shoulder and walk from 9am to 5pm, a 7 hours walk! I thought we might get sunburn, so I just covered my face and head by using my towel and Felicia came up a good idea that was put our wet cloth on our head to avoid sunburn and just like a clothes rack to air the wet cloth… Really smart ei… When others saw my ‘new dressing’, they all got a shock… Jill said that I looked like a terrorist... I knew that someone thought it was silly but it did have a good effect to block sun. We walked through the rain forest and got so many mosquitoes’ bites!! My poor blood… just sucked by those suck mosquitoes… I said we were too kind, we feed the mosquitoes for free…

At night when we talked about our ‘living conditions’, me and other two scholars all agreed that we never feel hostel was that nice before… Especially the toilets… even the hostel food! We pitched our tent at the seashore. Bad luck! Our tent was a broken one… At that night, I could not sleep well, even in my dream, I felt that the mosquitoes were biting me… That was the worst night I never experienced!!!

After an awful night, our ‘floating’ day was coming. The reason I call day 4 a floating day was because we were floating on the sea from 9am to 3.30pm… Actually, it was kayaking. We all kayaked double boat. My partner was Yu Yue. I don’t want to say anything about him… but he is really a good person… except… hehe. I really don’t want write this things down by English. English limited my thoughts… I just stop at here..

06/07/07 Day 5

FINALLY! That’s all what I wanna say... We all excited at the last day coz we were going back… These 5 days were really too hard for us. But from OBS, we really gained a lot, at least I did. Teamwork, leadership, insisting… yeah, a lot.