Africa Selection Camp – Day 8

Blog written by Robert Finney

Our day started off with an early morning mountain bike ride around beautiful Chateau d'Oex. It was quite difficult to wake up following a late party with the "old" Young Explorers. We followed back roads and dirt paths along a river to the nearby village of Rougement and then cruised back at high speeds along
the main road.

After a quick breakfast, we split into groups and began working on editing our videos on water conservation. Each group had to finish editing its video for a presentation in the evening. We struggled to finish on time, but everyone got their videos done.

Martin taught the other groups about navigating with maps and compasses. We learned about topographical maps, contour lines, taking bearings, and plotting locations on a map. Then Martin gave us six points around Chateau d'Oex that we had to pinpoint on the map and then hike to. After a couple of hours of hiking through tall grass and barbed wire, everyone found the points and returned to Hotel de Ville. This was great preparation for the raid because we will have to navigate tricky terrain under lots of stress. We could already see the difficulties of finding checkpoints with only a map and compass because we
easily got lost in the forest.

After another delicious dinner, we showed our videos. Everyone was impressed and it was a great way to exhibit our creativity in raising awareness about water conservation. One of the most engaging and funny videos was a rap to the sounds of turning off showers and sinks.

Once the videos were shown, Martin and Luke gave us information about the raid starting tomorrow. We're all so excited about the raid… for many of us it's the first proper adventure race we will participate in. It will include kayaking, mountain biking, hiking, zip lining, navigation, and a lot of teamwork. We'll be split into two groups and the winning group will have to work together and finish as a team. We celebrated Kate's birthday (again) with delicious carrot cake and a Kiwi specialty called Tim Tams. Everyone is off to bed early tonight in preparation for an exhausting and action-packed day tomorrow!