Venture Camp!

If you are looking for finger-licking good chicken to eat while sitting on the sand and defending the chicken from the stray bloodhounds eyeing your food, Pulau Ubin is the place to be. But before we get to that, we shall go back 1 day in time, to the start of Venture Camp!



To quote Zhongjun, "finally a reporting venue in the west..." And the honour goes to Mayfair Park! We were told to report here at 8am on Saturday, 30th May, and although the place was semi-unknown to many (except people like Zhongjun of course), most of us managed to report on time for the horseshoe. After the reorganising of groups and a quick inspection (and lots of ionised water droplets for me), Sup was to lead us to the start of our close terrain navigation. Fastforwarding past the boring and tiring walk along the long stretch of tar known as Rifle Range Road, we reached our start point/1st checkpoint and were told to look for a control card, which was a white piece of paper with 01's group emblem on it. Zhongjun lived up to his skills, and in a fashion where he would have said, "My gold orienteering not for nothing!", he found the cunningly placed control card, which was stuck on a random tree a few meters in from the road.



The next few hours up till 3pm was spent in Macritchie, where each group split up in search for even more cunningly placed control cards. My group, which consisted of Anurak, Soham, Leonard, Tak Wei and myself, stayed true to the purpose of this entire activity and practiced the skills we learnt, which was in essence just dead reckoning. There would be 1 navigator, 1 plotter, and 3 pacers, and we rotated the roles after each checkpoint. The basic navigation went something like this: After walking 100m in a straight line, the pacers would stop and shout "100m!". Hearing that, the navigator would say out the bearing we were walking at for the past 100m, and the plotters would plot this on the enlarged topo map version of Macritchie. Of course, this was the ideal case and what is desired does not always concur with reality. Often it went something like this: After walking anywhere between 95-105m in a direction thats off by a few degrees, the navigator will announce the bearing which is incorrect and the plotter will estimate the bearing and mark it out on the map. This was a perfect recipe to get lost, but being skilled venture scouts as we were, we managed to find the 1st checkpoint, although it was a good 70m away from where we thought it would be.



We reached the next few checkpoints in similar fashion. Note that reaching the checkpoint does not mean finding the checkpoint. This being Macritchie with all its crevices and revines and us not being people with GPS devices, it was fairly impossible to find a control card even though we know it is within a 50m radius of where we were. Sad to say, the first checkpoint was one of two checkpoints that we actually found on our own. One of the other checkpoint was somehow lost or eaten up as Zhi Xuan, who was following my group, could not even find it. Another checkpoint was skipped simply because the time we took searching for it was too grosteque. And the last checkpoint was found first by Sup's group, and we conveniently went to where we heard them shouting. The final checkpoint, however, was worthy of mention. We knew it was along a road, and we knew it was about 200m from a junction. Hence we paced that distance, and just as we reached the 200m mark, we turned left and immediately could spot the control card. This was an amazing feat compared to Francis's group, whom I heard took a long time to find the card, and who also tried to scam my group into believing its at the top of some random hill. Too bad! My group was just too good.
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ah screw it, takes too long writing properly. oh that was inspired by nyaa lesson, haha

some fun stuff that happened during close navi (note how soham is in all)
1. soham was plotting. after a break he said he couldnt find the protractor. a while later someone found it in his bottle compartment.
2. i asked where my permanant marker was. soham felt in his left pocket, and went like ohh shit. he remembers dammmm clearly he put it there, but somehow just couldn't find it. i asked him "does your pocket have a hole or something?" he went "oh ya shit...". and at the end of the hike, he found it in the netting of his long pants

oh well soham is just funny

going back to after close navi, we hiked to our night point which was the bamboo place. along the way we sang random songs until we forgot the lyrics, then switched songs! a dam good way to moralise yourself, but of course you need people!

night point was with zhongjun and leonard. we first chose an area to be our shelter, and we were thankful it didnt have ants, unlike some other (the suanning group) people. then we started a fire first, which was RATHER easy considering the amount of tinder and firewood we have. zj did the preparation, leonard did the cooking, i maintained the fire. we somehow managed to cook everything, including the rice! first few times in camp i could actually cook rice, except like ac or whatever la of course. for our shelter we did a basha like thing and covered it with leaves, but yea it was quite fail. oh well its more for the experience anyway.

sentry was siantry la. except i koped 1hr of zj's sleep and i had radio with me. hehe

the next day was pretty slow moving. in summary, we had a run from tampines to changi (8km), and a few ppl dropped out, but most made it alive. then we cooked lunch at the jetty, before proceeding to ubin!

thanks to the manymany firewood which we had cut during the preps, there were friggin lot of things to carry. we walked a short distance to some random beach, and prepared to cook our super delicious restaurant standard dinner! first up was digging an imba dig hole that could cover me, then dumping newspaper balls and kindling in, and laying tons of firewood on top, followed by balancing the pebbles we brought on the firewood. then, using a fuse that was soaked in j1's magic, we lighted the whole shit up and the fire was just hugeeeee, about a billion times bigger than my night 1 fire.

while all these were happening, people were also getting ready the food to cook. we wrapped them all in alum foil, then when preparation was done, we extinguished the flames, spammed the food inside the pit, and covered the whole pit up.

after i forgot how long of pitching bashas, the j1s took the food out and we were rewarded with a sumptuous dinner that also invited the ubin stray dogs. ya the food was more imba than cooking with mess tin, and certainly more imba than day 1 dinner.

rest of the day was spent lalaing, roasting marshmallows, and watching hioksupzihengamos suan themselves. i officially declare myself retired from the biggest suanner gang, hiok can take over my role. ironyirony. and night 2 was friggin long and cold cos we ended activity at like 8+, and had all the way till 7am.

the last day we had batch talk, reflections, experience sharings by j1s and zhi, and the final activity. we had to say a dream, a fear and a change. and of course one thing we would like to say to our batch

"I WONT PANGSEH" - Hiok Yang

everyone shall remember.

and of course mine: I hope we stay in contact forever.

01-06 is fantastic. They are my closest group of friends, they will be my closest group of friends, for up till NS at least, I won't know what will happen after that. Even if I get an accident and get a concussion and lose part of my memory, ask me who 01-06 is and I will remember. What sort of sucky life would I be leading now if I never knew this batch of amazing people?