Camping in Yaolin

The Duke of Edinburgh Award is a pretty fabulous school programme. Its basis: promoting leadership, service and challenge to British School students worldwide. I've been involved with DofE since the start of my teaching career and find particular value in the expedition part of the award.

This year, I accompanied a group of Bronze students on their three-day expedition to Yaolin, a four-hour bus ride from Shanghai.

Upon arrival, my group of seven students was appointed a guide from the tour company, Insight. Past guides have generally been 19-year-old untrained gap year students wanting to travel on the cheap so i was skeptical. We, however, were gifted with Mattijs, a dishy Dutch vegetarian with a taste for reading Dostoyevsky in the English because he found the Dutch translations 'a bit too tricky to deal with.' Besides being in literary heaven, Mattijs became the students' rock as they trudged their way through trails (a term I use loosely in the Chinese context), over mountains and across streams. My kids learned how to use a compass, how to triangulate a location if you're lost, how to set up camp and leave no trace. 

We, again, witnessed the beauty of the Chinese countryside and the paradoxical fear of its future. Logging trails dotted the landscape that didn't exist the year before and we had to wonder what this place would be like in ten years' time. 

For me, I wild camped for the first time in my life and impressed the group with my Promethean fire making ability (thank you summer camp). More importantly, I had one of those i'm-so-happy-with-life moments that come and go far too quickly. 

Returning to school on Monday was a supreme let down. Something about being in the woods makes data, deadlines and school agendas seem inconsequential. I spent the ensuing week in a haze of woodland cheer, a confusing feeling in the middle of an increasingly hectic school term.

I debated career changes. In fact, I still am.