Part 1… Complete
Wednesday night we headed off to Offcamber Adventures, the camp site and venue for our 4wd Drive Guides training. We would be there until Sunday afternoon.
The first night was spent getting to know the instructor and listening to all his stories, and does he have a lot of stories to tell! We were 4 people there, including the 3 of us from EC Offroad Adventures. We were split into teams and had to take turns to cook for each other. This was quite interesting as we normally just braai when we go camping, but we actually made meals this time. It turned out to actually be a lot easier than we’ve always thought, or perhaps we’ve just always been lazy. From now on we’ll be trying a couple of new things when we go camping.
The first day of actual learning came the next morning when we started with navigation. I found this the most interesting, especially because we were shown how to navigate using the stars. Other things we learned was how to deal with an emergency situation, how to organise and recce a trip, and then also how to run a trip. Things like what you need on your vehicle were also discussed. After the class we all headed for the pool to cool down before we studied a bit on what we did during the day. Then we headed off onto the 4×4 trail for some excitement.
The next day had us learning about poisons, bush camp safety, border post procedures and various other safety aspects. As we were going through the things quite fast, we decided that we’ll write the exam a day earlier, and thus going home a day earlier. So that afternoon we took a drive down to Patensie and when we came back studied a bit.
8:00 the following morning we started with the exam. It was a lot easier than we expected, and all of us did really well, with 98% being the average. We said our farewells and headed off home.
The only thing left now is for an assignment we need to do. This involves setting up a few tours on paper and also discussing various aspects of it. As we’ve already done a few of these for planning for trips we want to do, it shouldn’t be too difficult…. in theory obviously!