Location: Cocos Keeling
After a morning of classes with the unbelievable view that is Cocos Keeling, it was time for the infamous once-a-semester day the challenge course!!
Imagine this – 16 students broken up into four teams: pink, blue, green, and black. All are set free on the uninhabited Direction Island with a survivor like afternoon of challenges ahead: to hide their idol (for some it was a large fender, for others it was a life ring or a bag of life jackets) and then perform in a series of tasks until only the strongest team remained.
There was Emmas water balloon challenge, where team black had the best strategy with Zeke picking up Vera and sprinting down the beach. There was Rileys human ladder, where teams could only use each other to tie the highest (nautical science-approved) knot on a tree trunk, where Henry, on Fins shoulders, took the cake by a landslide. Then, my personal favorite, there was Perrys reverse tug of war. Here, two students faced off on a floating dock, trying to pull their way into the water while preventing their opponent from doing the same. There was not quite a clean-cut winner on this one.
The survivor-esc day finished with the ultimate sand castle building competition, making Zoe, the judge, question if we had a boat of professional small-scale builders. They were fantastic. Keith even had a massive hermit crab reigning over Team Greens castle, although that ultimately got them points docked as they apparently forgot about Zoes vegetarianism and love for the freedom of animals. No hermits were hurt.
As the castles were being built, Riley, Kyler, and Perry were firing up the charcoal grill and turning around some fabulous burgersespecially for a group that hadnt had any real BBQ in weeks. It was only a matter of minutes before we were fully surrounded by giant hermit crabs, and everyone, especially Keith and Perry, was having the time of their lives with this. Literally hundreds of crabs are hanging out all around us. We were all asking where the heck we even were because it was so otherworldly. Never mind the huntsman spider the size of my face hanging out on the toilet paper in the little bathrooms they had there. Or the massive coconut crabs eating our scraps as we cleaned it all up.
Overall, it was definitely one of my favorite days of the program thus far. There were challenges, there were triumphs, and there were so many laughs. It was a great way to wrap up our time on Cocos Keeling.