Outdoors Club Intro Trip

This past weekend I went to the mountains with the Outdoors Club for their Semester 2 Intro Trip. I went camping, bushwalking (hiking), and caving! We had 25 people in our group. We had people from Australia, America (me!), Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Finland, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

My Camping Experience

We left Melbourne at about 6pm on Friday and headed up the mountain. Our trip took about two hours. It was a little dissapointing that we didn't get to see the scenery since it was so dark, but we did get to see it on the way back down. There was actually quite a bit of farm land up there. It made me a little homesick seeing all of the open land and the cows.

We got to the campsite with a fire already going. We waited for the rest of the group to get there so we could put up our tents. I am so glad that I had brought mats to lay my sleeping bag on. The ground was wet and muddy and it seeped through the bottom of our tent.

We stayed up pretty late both nights by the fire. I learned, to my dismay, that Australia and the other countries represented don't eat S'mores when they go camping. Everyone, except the Canadians, had never had a S'more!! Australia doesn't even sell grahm crackers.

While sitting around the campfire, the locals proceeded to explain to use foreigners the dangers of the dropbear. I had heard about them before as another name for a koala bear. Now I was being told that these are family members of the koala bears, but are truly dangerous creature. They fall out trees and land on peoples heads and proceede to use their sharp teeth and claws to rip you apart. Pretty creepy right?

Well I did my own research and I have found that people are split on whether this is a folklore or if there really are scary version of koala bears lurking in the trees. What do you think? Real or Myth?

We ended up running out of wood faster than planned. So we tried searching the surrounding woods for dry wood but that was pretty much useless. I did find a tree that I ripped out of the ground with my bare hands....

....Okay, so maybe I just found it laying on the ground. haha. A group of people ended up taking a car and going and getting more wood for the fire.

While there, I dreaded having to use the restroom. If I went in the woods, I would probably end up with a leech. They had an outhouse provided, but as you can imagine, it was disgusting. I could taste the stench! All I could think of was "mom would never survive, she can't even use a port-a-john without gagging."

My Bushwalking Experience

On Saturday we woke up, ate breakfast, and then headed out to go bushwalking.

We walked quite a ways and had lunch on a little bridge. The trees here are much taller than the ones back home. They even shed their bark in long strips. So they end up looking white. You can see the white at the top half of the tree.

I also found out how annoying leeches can be. Ugh! I probably picked about 15 off of my legs throughout our walk. Luckily none of them had attached yet.

We then stopped at a big bridge where there used to be a railway.

The stairs were killer!

Then we headed back to the campsite. We set off to find the waterfall that was near our campsite.

My Caving Experience

I have never been caving before, but I had this whole perception of what it was like. I thought there would be spiders and that we would be army crawling through a long tunnel. I was so wrong. It was tons of fun. Thankfully there were no spiders. Yay! and we were not only crawling, but climbing and sqeezing through holes, and sliding down rocks.

This cave is a granite cave. There is water running through it so we had to walk through water during some points. It was pretty chilly. Luckily the water wasn't very high.

I took my GoPro with me but my head light was pretty dim, so unfortunately I didn't get a lot of good footage. I have put together a video of what I do have though. And I will upload more pictures once other people upload theirs.

Here is a picture of all of us in a open area in the cave. I am the one with the reflector arms in the middle.

Here is a picture of me after I climbed through the cave.

While I was caving, I slipped and fell down a rock. I didn't get hurt. I just slid on my butt down the rock way faster and much further than I would have liked. Well...come to find out, this happened. Good thing my sweatpants I had on under it didn't tear too!!