Tree Tops Trip - By Erin

On the 10^th of September my grade went to Tree Tops School Camp for a whole week. It was an eight hour long drive in our school’s smelly bus. When we got there everyone went to their dorms to have a shower and put on fresh clothes because everything is so dry and dusty here right now.

The kids did all the cooking ourselves and the food was great. We made things like: chicken and rice, mashed potatoes, Nshima with curries and pasta with tomato sauce. We did all of our cooking over an open charcoal fire.

Some of our activities were making plaster casts of animal footprints. Mr. Bowen said that our lion prints were the best ever! We did water color paintings of the river and we did a charcoal drawing of the humongous 2,000 year old Baobab tree in the camp. We did lots of safaris and saw: loads of pukus, a few impala, one huge elephant that charged at us, over 60 hippos, crocodiles, a cheetah, a leopard which ran away before all the kids could see it (I think we were a little loud on the bus), and the most amazing of all was 18 lions who had just started eating a dead hippo! The stomach was torn open and there was lots of half-digested grass falling out everywhere – the vultures had already gotten the eyeballs and brains!

We went on long safari walks through the bush in lion territory but we had Michael the guard with us and he had a gun to scare any predators away. Luckily on the long walk back to the camp the bus came to pick us up and for once the big, hot, stinky bus felt good!

We had a big bonfire one night and roasted marshmallows and had the best hot chocolate ever. It was made with sweetened condensed milk and it was sooooo good. One night we had a quiz on everything we saw and we learnt how to use a GPS.

The experience at Tree Tops was long, tiring, exciting, unforgettable and was the best field trip of my whole entire life!

Happy to be back home