Ardeche Adventure

My school has an annual Yellow Week (last week of the school year), where students go off timetable and enjoy a range of fun activities such as: visiting local fairgrounds, making chocolate, surfing in the North Sea (FREEZING!) and so many more. In addition you can go on a trip to Italy or even America for about ten days. As I am new to the school, this was my first Yellow Week and I went on the Ardeche Adventure. We: kayaked, canoed two days down the Ardeche River, rock climbed, caved, mountain biked, built rafts and visited the nearby city of Avignon. Also, most of my friends were going: Charlie, Matthew, Ben, Chris, Roxanne, Katia, Jasmine, Andrew, Joey, Finley, Elliott and Dan. It sounded great but how were we going to get there?

Unfortunately, a 26 hour coach ride was the answer but it was made slightly better by the fact that all my friends were there. Once we had arrived at our PGL site we were absolutely exhausted from sitting and fell asleep instantly! The day after was our first activity, kayaking. It was brilliant! Everyone fell in and one of the instructors sneaked up on us and capsized the boats before paddling away and choosing his next victim. We did a few rapids and also swam. Canoeing was up next and was almost the same as kayaking but each boat had two people. I went in the same boat as Matthew and it was awesome. These boats were a bit more cumbersome than the kayaks but it meant that the crashes and capsizes were even better to watch. We arrived at our bivouac site without capsizing once. The bivouac was quite basic, with our sleeping bags on top of carry mats with a massive tarpaulin as a roof. I slept in a ditch! At the site we saw a wild boar and also a scorpion. The next day we set off to complete our two day river descent. After, laughing a lot at others falling in, the tables turned as Matthew & I capsized twice but it was obviously the boat's fault and not ours! We then made it to shore where we waved goodbye to the river but hello to rock climbing and caving.

I had never done caving before and the idea of crawling through tight spaces underground sounded quite daunting, but boy was I wrong! It was great and really thrilling. It was also quite slippy so a lot of people fell over. We then switched over to rock climbing which wasn't too technical but quite tough in about 30 degrees Celsius.

On the last full day, we went to Avignon. It was a lovely little city to explore. Best of all we explored on our own. It was a very old, picturesque city that loved theatre more than anything else-apart from tourists. It was great especially when we bought ice cream from a small parlour whose owner we had assumed to be French but actually, he came from Bristol. He told us quite plainly our French was rubbish! The last day had arrived and so had Elliott's birthday. We woke him up around 6 o'clock and gave him ridiculous presents such as: a recorder, a leopard print clutch bag, a bright purple belt and a Tintin book in French. We then mountain biked and built rafts but we knew it was soon time to leave. Around 5 o'clock we left for home but we brought back awesome memories and experiences.

Here are a few pictures and videos of what we did.