The Camp Post

We’re back from camp, which was AWESOME! And I’ve never felt cleaner. Theresa wishes to apologise because she did not post last Tuesday so we are going to do a joint post to relive the disgusting unbelievable things we did at Camp. (Hi this is Theresa, I'm gonna write my bits in red okiedokies?)

Eating from disgusting, dirty, public lost-property plates: we brought plastic plates to camp, thinking we were being clever, as we could just dispose of them after use, instead of having to wash up. How wrong we were, the people wouldn’t accept plastic plates for some odd reason, and made us eat off dirty plates that were probably contained an infestation of herpes.

Sand/pee/stain/HERPES INFESTED beds: We walked into our cabins to be greeted with rows of metal frames with a piece of sandy, suspiciously pee-like smelling, stain infested mattresses thrown upon them. That’s right, I refuse to acknowledge them as so called “beds”.
On the first night we were naïve enough to think that we could all sleep together in one single bed simply for the heck of it. So we managed to fit four people onto a single bed with one blanket to share. Those on the edge ended up having a love-hate relationship with the metal ladder right next to them because it was the only thing keeping them from falling off, but was also radiating a lot of coldness.

Being completely soaked through 80% of our time awake: whether it was rain, lakewater or mud, we were pretty much saturated the entire time. Fortunately for me, I packed more than required. Unfortunately for those who laughed at me for overpacking, they were soaked through and ran out of clothes to wear. On the last day of camp, my suitcase weighed a HEAP MORE than it should, due to all the water and mud my clothes had soaked up. I was scared mould would start growing.

Brushing teeth and spitting on the ground: Because the bathrooms were tiny, cramped and dirty (are we starting to see a trend here?), we opted to brush our teeth outside in the corridors instead and spitting our toothpaste on the ground we had to walk past every morning. Honestly, that place should be called The Spitting Spot or something. What’s even more disgusting is that we never once felt the need to not walk over that particular spot every morning. Everyone just sort of acknowledged that they had spat there and continued walking.

We didn’t shower for the first 36 hours or so of camp: I saw no point to it. I was completely soaked due to the rain, and rain was clean right? The rain was probably cleaner than the creek water that was running out of the taps. And the showers were dark, smelly, small, and there were strange hairs all over the walls.

Crazy dancing: I swear the disco at the end of one of the nights was one of their many attempts at getting us as tired as possible. But hey, it was fun and very year 10 formal like. When ‘Low’ by Flo Rida came on and everyone kind of just lost their heads and dropped LOW LOW LOW until our thighs died. Many Congo lines also formed and so too did many circle of us girls trapping guys in a circle in attempts to get them to dance. At one point we even attempted to pull off a guy’s girly shirt (the theme was transgender). I don't know. Don't ask me.

Doing an (almost) nudie run after showering: yes, we eventually decided to shower on the second day of camp, after being saturated in river water and mud. As I mentioned above, the showers were extremely small, and I wasn’t going to spend a second longer than I had to in them. So I figured that the smart thing to do was to run from the shower to my room in a towel, and chuck on clothes in the actual cabin (dirty as the cabins were, they were bigger than the showers). As soon as I stepped out of the bathroom with a towel on, I realised what a grave mistake I had made. The corridor was packed with guys, and I had no choice but to run down the corridor, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. It did not help that my cabin was the furthest possible from the bathroom. Nor the fact that all the guys from the cabin opposite ours had decided to crowd around the door of our cabin, eating/fighting/doing what typical males do in each other’s companionship.

Ridiculous attempts at trying to keep dry/clean: Everytime we pulled someone up a giant swing and they were safely swinging and screaming their heads off, you’d see my whole activity group running to a puddle and cleaning their hands on the surface. And whenever it rained, you’d be able to see us all run to hide behind various poles and lying to ourselves that it was keeping us dry. We would have been a hilarious bunch to watch.

Prodding animal carcasses: it was a known fact of the day, that I could not, even if my life depended on it, row a kayak in a straight line. Nope, I’d zigzag through the creek, hitting one bank, pushing off the bank with my oar, until I hit the opposite bank. I reached a bank with a particularly funky looking tree on it. So I decided to prod it with my oar, because pushing off a funky looking tree was funner than just plainly pushing off the muddy bank. Being about 3cm away from it, I soon realised that the funky tree had fur. And legs. And ears. And suddenly, the funky tree wasn’t a tree anymore, no it was a dead kangaroo.

Get snorted at by a llama: The camp owns a whole lot of animals including ducks and llamas. One day after lunch, we decided it would be nice of us to acquaint ourselves with the pet llama. Turns out it was just as sick as we were and ended up sneezing and spraying us all with some sort of fluid after completely devouring the leaves we fed it.
There were also rumours that the hot chocolate/sausages we were being fed were made of llama milk/meat- I had much fun spreading it.

Not brushing my teeth: I decided to sleep in one morning, despite everyone’s extremely loud talking and door-banging. Not such a clever idea; I was practically late for breakfast, and had to rush there. Then I realised that I had not brushed my teeth, nor washed my face, and my hair was probably sticking up. But what the heck, I had probably caught herpes, I wasn’t showered, practically flashed to nearly the whole entire male population of our grade, and had drunken both rain and creek water. A few hairs out of place and bad morning breath were nothing.

Getting completely soaked in mud during the Commando game: This is a game where we’re all let off loose in the forest in pitch dark with no torches. The aim was the rescue some hostages whilst trying to avoid teachers with torches. We ended up literally crawling and lying like starfish in the mud. Apparently we were one of the only ones actually bothered to get so immersed in the game to literally swim in mud. But hey, I’m so glad we did because it was so thrilling and I got so muddy it has redefined the words “dirty”, “wet”, and “cold” for me.
Right after the game, there was a mad dash back to the campsite because no one wanted to miss out on the (cold, herpes infested) showers. It was hilarious because we all ended up getting lost in the middle of it and a million people started yelling out directions and no one knew who to listen to.

But despite all the above, they were what made camp so fun and awesome. So what if the weather wasn't co-operating, so what if everything was herpes infested? I had the best time.