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Adventurous pupils are setting a path for a once-in-a-lifetime expedition this summer as they trek through some of the remotest terrain in Vietnam and engage in communal activities along the way, writes Kristian Harrison.
The Year 12 pupils from the British School of Bahrain (BSB) will fly to the Southeast Asian nation on June 26 and spend two weeks travelling across the country as part of the World Challenge scheme, a programme aimed at teaching management, team-building and survival skills.
The team of 11, comprised of Floris van Manen, Dania Naeem, Ali Adenwala, Marc Zakharia, Laura Ashi, Ghazi Alaradi, Panos Panagiotou, Kevin Orme, Kindu Abu Tala, Hisham Karim and Dzianis Pasichny, will fly to Hanoi before taking an overnight train to the Lao Cai province, which lies on the northern border with China.
Once there, the team must arrange their own transportation to Sapa, a frontier market town where the trek portion of the expedition will take place. Discussing his team’s plans for the trek, Floris, 17, said: “We will be walking across isolated landscapes, including rice terraces, thick vegetation and the foothills of Fansipan, the highest mountain in the region.
“We will have a guide with us, so that we won’t get completely lost. They’ll have a GPS but only use it at the absolute last moment if we are truly stuck.
“The guide will also be our translator, as we have to stay in homestays provided by the local ethnic minorities. Our hosts will provide us with their expert knowledge about the region and its culture which will help us on our journey, and in return we will help them make food and do some chores around their homes to help them out.”
After the journey, which is expected to take five days, the group will travel back to Hanoi via train, where they will have a day to explore the bustling markets and sights of Vietnam’s capital.
Then, there will be four days of community engagement and project building. Although the exact nature of their task has not been revealed yet, previous World Challenge expeditions have had groups performing maintenance and construction work, such as building houses and toilet blocks, cultural interaction such as staging plays and playing games with local children, teaching at a local school, and farm chores, such as ploughing and hoeing the land to prepare it for planting rice.
Floris added: “This is the most exciting aspect for all of us, I believe. The more we help, the more we will be appreciated and this, in turn, will lead to us making more friends, learning more about their culture and engaging with the wider community.
“Although it’s obviously something impressive to put on our CVs and we even get UCAS points for it, the main point for us is to support nations in need and proving that we are capable of other skills and doing more than being academic. The aim is to learn about being independent, by arranging everything ourselves like travel, homestays, and purifying water, and also teamwork and supporting each other.
“We are all proud to be making a difference, however small, to those less privileged than us.”
The final few days of the trip is dubbed the ‘rest and relaxation’ period, where the group will visit the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Halong Bay, one of the most beautiful havens in the world. They will return to Bahrain on July 10.
Impressively, the challenge is entirely self-funded, which has led to fierce efforts to seek sponsorship. Floris said: “We have to pay for all travelling costs, such as the flights there and the trains between cities, and then also spending money while we are there. We’re still actively seeking sponsorship, we’ve asked House of Uniforms so we can give clothes to schoolchildren over there, and we’re in touch with local stationery outlets so we can take coloured pencils for the children.”
For now, though, the focus remains on acclimatising the body for the gruelling trek portion, which will involve exhausting days stumbling through Bahrain’s desert. Floris explained: “We did a training weekend recently where we trekked through the desert over a weekend. We walked to the Tree of Life from a nearby camel farm, then to the military base where we camped for one night and cooked for ourselves, then we walked back to the Tree of Life on the second day.
“I had horrible cramps after the training, so I don’t want to imagine what it’ll be like on the trek when we’ll be doing it for five days and on much steeper land! But we’ll also be carrying much less as we won’t have the tents and sleeping bags, so we’ll see. There will be another couple of training exercises and fitness sessions before we go, so hopefully we’ll be in shape.”
The teenagers also got together recently at Floris’ home in Jasra to try out some traditional Vietnamese fare they prepared themselves.
