GROOVY RECOUNTS!

In Term 1 we wrote recounts about our most memorable time at camp! I really wanted to get some up on the blog to share. Hope you enjoy them!  

The Kauri Walk by GORCOL

The glaring sun barely made a twinge of light in the dark damp forest. An icy cold river lay stunningly beautiful and stupendously fast flowing before us. We bravely decided to get across by a rope. Carefully we clambered across the stream, one by one clinging onto the rope. Suddenly it was my turn. My heart skipped as I dipped my feet nervously into the freezing cold water. I manoeuvred my feet into the gaps in the rocks ."Low and slow", "Low and slow" played through my mind as I crossed. With one more leap I was across! A wave of triumph swept through my body.

Sqwilch, sqwelch, sqwilch, sqwelch went our shoes as we trudged along the track!


Hula By BarAsh

I felt so excited like it was my birthday and I was opening presents! Mayala, NobJam and WalMih approached the stage. Everyone was silent like sleeping cats. NobJam said " We're going to start with Mr Preddy!" He looked around and in his head I bet he thought "Me, you mean me?" He got up onto the stage and everyone was cheering ! We started singing the hula song while Mrs Nobilo was playing the tune on her guitar. Everyone was singing  "Thats the way Mr Preddy does the hula" over and over again!

Mayala announced  that all camp parents have to come up and do the hula, but all the men did the haka like confident rugby players, while the women looked beautiful doing the hula! It was a funny and hilarious night for everybody at that one special camp!

Published By WhaAly

Swimming sports!

Last week the senior syndicate went to swimming sports! 
There were awesome events like freestyle,breaststroke, backstroke, flutter-board, relays and much,much more. 


But when it came to speed our "secret weapon" LimOli kicked in and blitzed!
We had a lot  of other really great swimmers in our class too, that had very amazing successes!

LimOli won backstroke, the year 6's came 3rd in the relay and much more!

Lots of people made the interschools like NobJam, LimOli and PerSha!Awesome aye!

By GorCol

Cross Country Poem

On your marks, Get set..............GO!

Wind blowing my long dark hair, racers running everywhere
1st, 2nd,3rd, then 4th and up coming the lucky 5th.
Getting tired and getting puffed, and at the end you've had enough!
But it was worth every single trace, I'm very glad I  finished the race.
By WhaAly

The Rest of My Holiday

I am sitting in Dubhai airport on the way back home to New Zealand. We have a 4 hour wait here, then a 15 hour flight to Sydney, then 3 hours back to New Zealand. It takes about 30 hours in total!

From Montenegro, we went to Croatia. Mostly we travelled along the beautiful coastline - the water is the most amazing blue colour, and very very clear. I even had a swim (but it was FREEZING). We visited lots of medieval walled towns, which were fascinating. The biggest was Dubrovnik. Here is a picture of it:

There are lots of shops and restaurants and houses now inside the walls, so it is a living place. We walked right round the walls (about 2 km). They are very thick and very high, with hundreds of stairs, and many towers. Interestingly, Dubrovnik was attacked in the 1990's by the Yugoslav Army, and much damage was done to the walls, but the people have fixed them all up again and they have done a great job. You can see how much protection these medieval walls give to the people inside.

From Croatia, we spent one day driving to Mostar in Bosnia. Another country which has suffered wars quite recently, and you could see damage in the walls of buildings from all the shelling. Mostar has a very beautiful bridge, which got bombed, and has also been fixed up now.

The most incredibly beautiful place I have seen on the whole trip has to be Plitvice Lakes in Croatia. It was a long drive to get there, but it was amazing! We walked for about 5 hours, along tracks and boardwalks which went over and around waterfalls, for about 6 lakes and maybe 100 waterfalls! Bears and wolves live in this area too, but we didnt see any, though we saw some caves that looked like a good place for a bear to live. Look:

This is a map of the area, showing the lakes and where the falls are (called SLAP in Croatian).

Most of the boardwalks had no handrails. Luckily this one did, as we had to walk OVER this waterfall!

Can you see the people walking on the boadwalk in the far distance of this cave?

It is impossible to show you just how beautiful this place was, but it was incredible!

From Croatia we went to Slovenia (another of the old Yugoslavian countries). We did two very different things in Slovenia. Firstly we went in the MOST SCARY but amazing cave I have ever seen! It was enormous, and we had to go on a guided tour. We walked down and down and down to the cave entrance, then walked through the cave, sometimes on narrow little pathways on the sides of cliffs (with good fences thank goodness), and had to cross a little bridge 45 m (measure it - it was HIGH) across a raging underground river and waterfall. After all that downhill, I was very pleased to discover there was a lift to take us back up again!

The second thing we did was visit Lipica - the town where the Lippizaner horse breed was developed over 4 hundred years ago! These horses are nearly all grey (white), and are very good at performing difficult movements above the ground that used to be used in battle when battles were fought on horseback.

On our way back to Germany, we went to a salt mine in Austria. Again we went deep underground to see how salt was mined. We had to wear white suits like the Oompaloompas in the Willy Wonka movie, and travelled on little trains, and slides, and walked, and went on a boat on an underground lake! We even crossed the border underground into Germany and back again.

Once we were back in Germany, the weather got very very cold, but we didnt mind. Now we are on our way back to New Zealand, and on Tuesday I will be back in class with all of you again!

Albania

From Greece, we drove to Albania, a country that had been under communist rule until about 15 years ago. That meant that nobody could visit the country, and nobody could leave it. Now that Albania is democratic (which means that the people can vote for a government), it also means that tourists can visit. Albania was a very interesting country to visit. It is developing very fast, as better roads are being built, and people are changing the sorts of jobs they do. It has a very beautiful coastline with amazing beaches, that are just starting to get set up for people to come and stay. Some of the roads are still terrible, with large potholes, and slips which have not been cleared away. This made interesting driving for us!

The methods of transport were amazing. Some country people still used a donkey and cart as their main transport, and they would drive this in to town to buy things. The next group of people had tractors, and they would take these into town, and some people had cars – Mercedes mostly! Not many people were allowed to have cars when Albania was under communist rule. So in towns, it was not unusual to see tractors, donkeys, cars, horses all tied up on the sides of the roads! They all shared the roads together. Most country people also had a cow or a small herd of sheep or goats, but because they had no fences, one person in the family had to take the animal/s out to graze each day and sit and watch them so they didn’t run away. The sheep looked much better trained than most sheep I see in New Zealand!

This lady was right in town. She has her little donkey with a very big cart, and her cow tied on the back, going out to work in the fields for the day.

The landscape was quite changing, from flat to hilly to rocky, but right through Albania there were round concrete bunkers – safe places where people could hide if they were under attack from other countries. The man who designed the bunkers was asked if they would be strong enough to keep people safe from bombing shells, and he said yes, so he was made to go inside one while they bombed it, and when he survived, the communist party bought lots and put them all over the country!

Montenegro

In the 1990’s, the country that used to be known as Yugoslavia, had many changes, including wars, and now forms many new countries – including Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, and Slovenia. From Albania we went to Montenegro, the country with the wolves! We drove up a huge mountain in a national park, right to the snow, as at the top of the mountain was a mausoleum – a burial place/tomb for one of the important founding people of Montenegro. Montenegro means black mountain, which is the mountain we were on, that the country took its name from. Unfortunately, about 1.5 km from the summit, the road was undrivable, because snow covered it, so we had to (very carefully) turn the camper around, and park for a while, and walk the rest of the way. We saw no sign of wolves (or bears), but I imagine they come out more at the night time, rather than during the day.

This GPS photo shows one of the VERY windy zig zag roads we had to go on to get down an enormous mountain. Here is the view from the top:

We also visited a spectacular lake in Montenegro called Skadar – a lake that has water that reaches 30 degrees celcius in the summer, while the air temperature is 40 degrees. I was very pleased we were there in the spring time!

Mt Vesuvius and Pompeii

It is an interesting thing, but when you use "Blogspot" in a different country, it comes up with the language of that country for all the headings until you sign in, then it changes to English! I am pleased you have all been working hard. I cant wait to hear about Mokee Joe.
I have been in Croatia, but now am in Slovenia. Internet was very expensive in Croatia, but tonight, in Slovenia, it is free!

Here is another update on some of the highlights of my trip:

These two places in the title are in Naples, a city south of Rome. The first thing I noticed was the huge amount of rubbish lying on the sides of the roads. It seemed that nobody cared to pick it up at all. It was a great shame because the area had some beautiful features. We drove up Mt Vesuvius, a volcano, which had erupted and spread ash over the Roman City of Pompeii nearly two thousand years ago. It was much like Mt Ruapehu, except that there were souvenir stalls along the walk to the summit.

The next morning we went to visit Pompeii. Because the city had been covered in ash and buried almost 2000 years ago, killing many of the people who lived there, when it was excavated, the city was actually found to be in very good condition, and shows what life would have been like in Roman times. It was an amazing place to walk around, because all the roads and many of the buildings were in such good order. Most of the people didn’t cook at home back then, because their houses were too small, so they used to go up the street to buy dinner (just like McDonalds in the olden days!) The Romans were very good builders, and knew how to build very good cobbled streets and stone buildings. Some of the bigger houses had beautiful paintings called frescos painted on the walls. We also visited a bath house (because there were no baths in the houses), which were also beautifully decorated, and even had a gymnasium!

This is the bathhouse!

That afternoon we drove along the Amalfi coast – a spectacular road high on the cliffs above the coast. It was a tricky road because most of it was very narrow, with just little walls stopping us from falling over the cliffs. When we met vehicles like buses coming towards us, we had to go very slowly, and sometimes stop, with literally inches to spare on each side (sometimes less!) There were lots of tunnels, and when we went through towns, there were shops just right out our window! The views were amazing though, when I didn’t have my eyes closed in fright!

This is how narrow some parts of the road was going through towns. This is TWO WAY, so meeting a bus in these bits was very tricky!

Yep.. just after I took this photo, we DID meet a bus on that corner just before the tunnel - we had only about one inch to spare on each side, and over that wall was a huge drop straight into the sea!

Looking back at some of the road we drove on.

Greece

The next day we had our 15 hour ferry crossing to Greece. It was overnight, so we got to sleep in the camper on the boat! It was a very big ferry, and we were lined up with all the enormous trucks on the deck. For once our camper looked very small.

Greece is very hilly, and also very beautiful, with lovely bright blue water, and nice houses along the coastlines, with lots and lots of olive trees (some are meant to be 2000 years old!) We went to Athens, which is the capital of Greece, a very big city which has as many people as the whole of New Zealand! We visited the Acropolis (I got you all a postcard from here, but sadly I STILL haven’t posted it!) – this is where the Parthenon is – a very big and very old Greek temple, which is being restored. It was a VERY big hill to walk up to get to see it, and at the top we got a fantastic view of all of Athens. There were school groups up there, on class about the same age as all of you, so they get to have pretty cool school trips over there! They were listening hard to their teacher, which is what I know Room 3 would be doing too.

We visited lots of other Greek ruins in Greece. The Romans have copied lots of the Grecian architecture in their buildings, but the Greek buildings are older.

One of my all time favourite places we have visited is Meteora, in Greece - a place where monks built monasteries up on the top of very high, and very narrow rocks. I walked in to one of them, and it was quite scary as you can see in the photo that the steps were carved out of the rock, and wound their way around the rock to the building at the top. It was a very long way down!

hi

Just a quick message from me to ask what time you would like to see me next week for a bit of a hand over????   I can come in on Tuesday about  9.30ish if that suits.  I understand that the cross country is after morning tea.  I can have some work for the kids to go on with at this time.  Otherwise I am in on Wednesday in Room 2.  Let me know what you think. 

Thanks A