Berwick - Bivvy, Bus, Walk! - Sam Kilsby

“Ahhh,” I groaned forlornly as I sat on the seats of the cotton seats of the Tinto bus, listening to the squeaky laugh of Spongebob. Mismatched scenery blurred past my line of sight, changing and twisting, becoming more obscure by the second. Finally, the automatic doors hissed open, and for the first time I glimpsed Berwick Camp.

It was awesome, not the flashest thing in the world, but then again what proper camp is? We were given twenty minutes to unload and settle into our bunkroom. We had the meanest bunkroom. I could tell you plenty of the funniest stories about the things we did in there, but that is another story,

Mr Sloan sounded the whistle when our twenty minutes was up. We all raced across the pathway to the main deck. “We are going to walk up and along a logging track to the outlook over the swampland, then go down to the camp and build the Bivoacs,” said Mr Sloan.

We set out across the gravel smothered road at 10.45, of which we turned off almost instantly, on to a logging track. The uphill slope steadily increased as the forest gave way to a sun baked road, surrounded by steep rocky mounds. A front group of faster people were quickly established, with the slower group tagging along behind. We reached a signpost on top of the flats of the hill which we had just climbed, and waited for the other group to catch up.

After studying the sign we headed down a mud bathed path that twisted and wound in unpredictable patterns. That caused a few slips and slides. Finally, after many arduous paces, which reached the lookout, which was unfortunately too wet to have lunch on. So we continued down a gorse covered bike track until we hit Farm Road. We stopped at an old rusted outhouse just off the road, and sat down to eat our lunch. After we had scoffed our lunch, we got up and played a game of Scrag, until we were called over by Mr Sloan, and sorted into our activity groups to build our bivouacs.

We were sent out into different parts of the surrounding area to build a shelter out of natural materials. My group “The pro pink team,” was luckily sent to an area with tons of natural resources, and managed to build an awesome shelter with a bridge and even a fireplace. Unfortunately, we had a gaping hole that we didn’t think we had to patch up, but we still got second place.

The last part of the walk was not incredibly difficult, but we all sprawled on the deck the moment we arrived back at camp, little did we know, the day had barely begun!!