Overnight Camp

Re-used this post from my own blog, since I spent a lot of time on the post, and it is rather comprehensive =)

Returned yesterday from overnight camp, its a really different experience compared to the past 2 overnight camps I went through, when I was still in the Scout Unit.

The pictures are here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=27048&l=e15fa&id=563652241 (Don't worry it is accessible by non-users of facebook) I didn't upload them to blogger because there's a problem with mass uploading photos here.

I went to school on friday wearing my scout uniform because it was Founders Day for scouting. Although it sucks to be wearing uniform because its less comfortable than school uniform, but hey, I don't have to bring along my school uniform along with all my camp stuff, and that would occupy less space in my bag =) I spilled a lot of limewater (Calcium Hydroxide) onto my pants because I was stupid in the chem lab. Luckily it didn't stain my pants or whatsoever.

Then we started off our camp with backwoods. We moved all of our firewood, food, bags of tinder, sand, blah blah to Braddell forest, with some help from Kumaran and his car. We started off our backwoods by laying out some of our firewood and positioning our tinder/kinder so it can start a fire efficiently. Then, Kumaran gave us a brief run through of the weaknesses of each kind of fire: TP, cross ditch, trench, platform. Then, he proceeded on to demonstrate how to fillet a fish. The fish was pretty big, and Kumaran managed to get 2 huge chunks of meat out of the fish. After that, we proceeded on to the killing of the frogs which Kumaran bought, the big hoo-haa which was the highlight of backwoods, if not the entire camp for us (the investiture is more meaningful than frog-killing, but its not as exciting). Yanzhi showed us how to kill a frog; he took the struggling frog, concussed it on the brick, and then repeated that a few times, and then used a small razor to make a small incision on the frog's back, and then skinned it using his bare hands (no more use of razor). Then, he (forcefully) removed the frog's legs and arms by twisting it off, and disposed of the rest of the body. In a real survival situation, the guts your prey can be used to bait other animals.

Then, we all took turns to kill frogs. For my frog, I didn't have such a firm grip on it (its wet and slightly slimy), and so it slipped out of my grip after it got concussed the first time. Luckily it didn't react or what when I placed it in my grip again, which (I hope) means that it was dead or unconscious. Then I did a couple of more blows to it where its tongue came out and some cavity in its head burst, splashing my hands with blood. Then I bought it to the garbage bags to do the skinning and gutting. I made an incision on the back, and ripped the skin apart and yanked off the skin from its legs and body. While ripping, the frog's anal muscles went loose and all its faeces went onto my hand T.T It was pretty grueling as the skin is rather tightly adhered to the body, especially at the knee/finger joints. I managed to skin the frog without bursting the cavity at the torso which contained all the guts, which was a good thing. Then, I managed to twist off all the limbs with some difficulty, and then I burst the cavity to take a look at its guts. The liver was rather healthy looking, but the gall bladder was too deep inside so I didn't bother to take it out, as there was another guy waiting to use my place.

After that, I went back to the fires, where I tried to get the fire going, but my efforts were in vain. Then Royce came to help around, and finally everyone got their fires going. We took a long time to cook, because we had to prepare our containers first. And to prepare containers (those made from the skin of fruits, such as orange, pineapple, watermelon, etc) we had to eat up all the flesh in it. Meanwhile, Cheeyeow took out his bread dough. It was overflowing out of its box. Today morning, the bread dough was only filling up 4/5 of the box. So much for the expansion of the dough! We were like, "If there's not enough dough for everyone, we can just wait a couple of hours and let it growww". We used a parang to de-bark a long, random stick we found on the ground, and then wrapped the dough around it. The make-shift bread was more than satisfactory. Maybe the fact that Cheeyeow's family owns Tong Garden, and so he has that culinary blood flowing in his veins. Then, we proceeded on to cook our rice (failure) and also our veg (extremely raw even after spending one hour on the flames). The fish meat was OK, but the skin tasted a bit fishy, and we forgot to bring our condiments such as salt etc, so it was tasteless. The first batch of froglegs came out from the skewers, and everyone was dying to have a taste. Some people got jacked as some of the legs were still half raw. I myself ate a bit of 3/4 raw frog leg (just the calf) and it tasted O.K.

At around 7+, we tried to finish all our food, and packed everything up, before it got too dark. We had a lot of equipment and stuff lying around, and its already dark in a forest, if it gets late, we will surely not be able to find our equipment. We returned to RI, to realise that the gate was locked. Luckily, there was a little depression at the bottom of the gate, so we managed to crawl through. My elbow got hit by a fire extinguisher while crawling through....ouch.

We returned our stuff, and then proceeded to set up our bashas. We took a grand slam total of 30+ minutes to set up our basha. Back in GTC'06 we were taking like 8 minutes plus, and now we are taking 1/2 an hour, heheh. We owed a decent number for that feat. But that 30 minutes+ was rather justified; we were really hungry because we ate too little for backwoods, we were really tired already, and the ground was really rocky and hard. This was already bad enough, and we only had 2 pebbles to circulate around to hammer the pegs into the ground, if they can be hammered in at all. Then, we moved our bags into the bashas, and realised that some of the bags we moved in were the bags of JC1s, and we had to sort out our bags again.

Then, we went on to night games, where it was a pretty decent success, thanks to Cheeyeow's comprehensive planning beforehand. My station was pretty lame, (counting sheeps). We only had 3-4 patrols (out of 6) visiting us, as we were in a rather "inactive" place, somewhere in the admin block. I gave a accuracy deviance as counting sheeps on the pixelated pictures was a seriously screwed task. Then, after the de-brief and whatnots, we went for supper. And when the crackers came around, everyone went nuts because we were all starved and famished. Junjie AND HALIIM [edited =)] were nice enough to run all the way to the 7-11 at J8 to get us some bread because all of us barely ate anything for backwoods. After our supper, we went to sleep, lights out at 12.15am. I woke up at 2.30am for sentry until 3.30am. During the sentry with Weekien and Ram, they went to bathe, leaving me to do my sentry alone (they were the only people who bathed in last year's Scout Unit Training Camp too). I went to leech off some companionship from the sentries from the Scout Unit and ate a bit of the chips they had. Then I helped Weekien the wimp to sew on his name tag, as that wimp doesn't know how to sew. I already spent my recess sewing on his Venture flashes, bloody bugger. Then, after more talking kok, it was 3.30am, and I went back to my basha to sleep, only to find Jeremy sleeping there. Apparently he just goes into other people's bashas and sleep. Actually there wasn't even enough space around in the bashas to begin with, so he had to leech off his space from people who were doing sentry. So not really his fault =P

Woke up at 6.30am with my arms in my sleeves, the strong winds in the night were just too cold.....brrr... Changed into scout uniform to prepare for flag raising, then went for a slightly hardcore PT. We did a lot of stuff, running around, some telephone game which was simply running something like shuttle run over various distances, and also sets. Then, we went for breakfast, which was pretty good. It was the standard scouts breakfast: Cheap (but good) bread, cheap (but good) fruit jam, cheap and canned (but good) kaya, and the cheap (but not as good as milo) ovaltine. Scouts ovaltine is a cunning thing. Last year I was cooking ovaltine, and I was instructed: "Add JUST ENOUGH ovaltine to give the ovaltine the brown colour, then spam sugar to give it the taste". Well, the product is a nice partially-pseudo-ovaltine which everyone's happy about (since it tasted nice anyway). Don't know about whether this year's ovaltine was honest or not. But dishonest ovaltine tastes good too(possibly better), so who cares? Then me and Nathan got pumped 50 by Sarun for forgetting to clean the equipment which we used last night...didn't remember to clean it during our sentry, but I don't feel THAT guilty over it, since no one can wake up at 2.30am and remember to clean equipment lol.

Then we went for footdrill, where it was simply hilarious. Yanzhi was laughing throughout the thing because he tried to make us do stupid and funny stuff with footdrill. For example, there is this command to make the contingent/squad move a few steps to the right/left/front/backwards. Then, it is usually used like for numbers less than 5. Then Yanzhi wanted us to move across the field in front of S.Raja block using that command, but he didn't know a big number in malay (footdrill commands were given in malay). So he had to consult Haliim, and he pronounced the command wrongly even after Haliim repeated the command a lot of times for him. Finally he got it right, and we moved across the field looking like crabs, as we had to move sideways (everyone was laughing). We also took 5 minutes water break every 10 minutes because footdrill was boring and everyone knew the commands. During the footdrill Yanzhi also positioned us for damn guailan reasons.
Like:

Yanzhi: "Which side scenery you like better, front or back"
Ventures: "Back la"
Yanzhi: "Ok. Keblakan-Pusing!" (turn 180 degrees)

Another one:
(we were standing at the edge of the void deck of Raja block, and Yanzhi was out in the open)

Yanzhi: "Wah you all move forward so much, now I am in the sun...zzz....ok....enam lanka keblacan krah!" (move backwards 6 steps)
*VU moves back 6 steps*
Yanzhi: "Good, now I'm in the shade"

We also performed some footdrill for the sec1s, their footdrill is far from perfect, long way to go man!! After footdrill was free and easy, I ate some canned tuna which I found in my bag. Last year, I couldn't find THIS particular can of tuna, and I spent an entire afternoon of my GTC hike famished and starved. Now its time to eat it up. I spent my time sewing on Cheeyeow's Venture Flashes. His uniform is rather old, and is very soft, and my thread went through the entire sleeve (not 1 side of the sleeve) without knowing it, as I totally couldn't feel the needle going through the fabric. Then I had to keep on re-doing the thing. Then we went for lunch, which was pretty tasty =) (packet lunch) Then after lunch we went to undo our bashas, and also me and nathan went to facilitate the Patrol Item Inspection for the Scout unit. There are a hell lot of ants in the Scout Unit cooking equipment, champion. And there was also a lot of beehoon bits in some pot. Well well. At least they have cooking equipment =D

Then, we put our bags into a classroom, and went for investiture rehearsal. It was pretty boring, as it was rehearsal. Nothing much to say, just that we weren't told to salute after we take a step back after being invested. The postholder's investiture was also pretty kok for the VEXCO, as we didn't practise marching out together. Then, we went for dinner, and changed into our scout uniforms. Zhixuan's flashes were coming out since he didn't use double thread to do his sewing, and I had to sew his flashes on.

Finally came the actual investiture itself, with the torches and stuff (condemned poles with an end wrapped in cloth, then soaked in turpentine). Venture Unit investiture was held seperately in a close and small horseshoe, and I am glad that everyone turned up. It was a rather significant and meaningful event, as we were officially moving on to Venturing. During my investiture, I did a keblakan-pusing, but there was this darned rock in the middle of nowhere and my leg hit it, causing me to nearly trip. Bleargh. After the venture investiture, we took a picture (Kumaran is surprisingly proficient at helping others wear berets, everyone were amazed at how nice the berets looked). We took a group photo with a couple of people still in the toilet admiring their berets =.=, and then we went to join the main horseshoe with the Advisory Council, Group Council, Scout Unit, and the teachers and alumni. The investiture of the Venture Exco went pretty well, and we didn't screw up our marching haha.

After the horseshoe, we had a last seperate horseshoe with Kumaran, where he told us a meaningful tale, and encouraged us to question, as well as challenge traditions, embrace change, and wished us luck in our Venturing year. We were finally Bersurai-ed after that, signifying the end to this meaningful and exciting camp.