This year was pretty awesome too, although not as good as the previous years. We had a couple of random people tag along on our trip who kind of ruined it. Here's some more detail about what we did, if you can't be bothered reading then just skip ahead to the photos.
Once again, I had to get up at like 6 am on Sunday morning to get to school on time. Bus ride took like 6 or 7 hours but we eventually got there. Same place as always, a little camp site located in the Tongariro National Park. If you've never heard of that, which you probably haven't, it's basically the Skyrim of New Zealand. Like damn, I couldn't believe how much they looked alike. It was just low grassy plains for miles and mountains in every direction you look. So anyway, when we got to camp we were supposed to do some stupid activity but ended up just chilling in the lounge area instead which was pretty sweet.
On Monday morning we climbed Mount Ngauruhoe...again. However last year we couldn't make it all the way to the top because of the weather, but this year we managed it. For those of you that don't know, Mt Ngauruhoe is Mt Doom from LOTR. Climbing it was such an awesome experience. The hike to the foot of the mountain took about 2 hours and the climb itself around 3, not counting the time it took to get back. What's even more awesome is that right across from Mt Doom is where they filmed Helm's Deep, so yeah that was pretty awesome. Coming down the mountain was heaps of fun, on one side of the mountain it's just loose rock. So you just lean back and walk down casually. Good stuff. You can imagine that after a whole day of hiking and climbing we were all pretty tired so we just coma'd after we got back to camp. No DMC's tonight.
Tuesday was probably my favorite day of them all. We did an overnight. Basically what you do is walk into the bush for a few hours, find a spot, set up a shelter and go to sleep. The day started off really miserable because it was raining, it was muddy and just wasn't fun. But once we set up the shelter, collected fire wood and all that shit we had a bit of free time. And wow, was that awesome. My friends and I are extremely dry, so for our free time we started filming documentaries David Attenborough style. Some of my friends would play the animals and another would be the narrator. It sounds really stupid but holy shit, it was so much fun. After a while of shooting documentaries we had a nice camp fire going and everyone just sat around it and roasted marshmallows. One of the highlights was when everyone was really quiet and my best mate started singing the Lion King opening song extremely loud, you know, the African part. That was just the funniest shit ever. Sleeping that night was kind of uncomfortable because the shelter was way too small for the boys. We ended up sleeping on top of each other
Okay, so it's Wednesday and we all just woke up in our shelters. The hike back was a lot better because it wasn't raining anymore. Once we ate and all that shit we went white water rafting. That shit is really fun. I can't remember the river we went along but it had something like 86 rapids, which was nowhere near enough. It was so much fun I didn't want it to end. After that we went to the hot pools, it was pretty cool. The girls were looking good.
Thursday we didn't do all that much. We were supposed to go caving, but because my friends I woke up too late we stopped everyone from going. Stayed up almost all night having DMC's so that didn't leave much time for sleep for us. But anyway, Thursday turned out to be awesome. We did a small hike, only around 3 hours to a waterfall. It's a hell of a good feeling to be standing under a waterfall, I can tell you that much. After the hike we split up into 2 groups, because we had a shit load of people, and did a stream walk. It sounds really gay because all you do is walk in a cold stream for 30 minutes. But it's the people that really make it fun, the stream walk turned out to be really awesome. We got back pretty early and we had the rest of the day to chill. We would be leaving at like 8 am the following morning so we could just stay up and play table tennis and relax as long as we wanted.
I freakin' love my school camps. Every time I go I bring back so many priceless memories. So yeah, hope you enjoyed my little story. If not, **** off. Here are some pics in no particular order.
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