The best time I got in a canoe was undoubtedly when I went to Sweden. As mentioned earlier on I met some friends whilst I was on my foreign exchange year in Lille, France. I ended up spending quite a lot of time with Kat, Kirsty and Emma who were all from Hull University. I got on with them all really well, we shared a very similar sense of humour.
Kat was Swedish although you would never have known from her accent. She had grown up in England and she had no hint of a Swedish twang when she spoke. We got to know each other pretty well so she knew the kinds of things I was interested in and knew I was looking for things to do when we broke up for summer at the end of the year. She suggested one day that I might like to apply to work in a summer camp she had been to a few times when she was growing up. It was called Brevik, and was a confirmation camp for children. I was clueless as to what that meant, but learnt from Kat that it’s an important coming of age event to many Swedish families. This was only one part of the camp experience. The rest involved a lot of activities designed for children to experience outdoor life, with the main attraction being an eight day canoe hike around the Swedish archipelago. Sold. It sounded amazing.
I got the details from Kat and sent a letter to the camp organiser asking if I could be one of the supervisors. I attached my CV and outlined my hobbies and relevant work experience to that point. The most appropriate one was my time working as a pool lifeguard in England. I’d worked at Wyndley Leisure Centre in Sutton Coldfield during the term breaks, and during the summer they had children’s clubs. These were designed to give kids something to do while their parents were at work during the summer holidays. There were four activity areas which the kids went to in rotation and included various sports such as rounders, basketball, badminton or whatever looked like being popular. I volunteered for the extra work because I needed the money and because it sounded like fun. It was, to a degree.
I discovered I’m not the most patient, particularly with children that didn’t want to get involved. As these clubs were sometimes seen as something to ship your kids off to whilst parents were at work, there were always some kids that didn’t want to be there. I couldn’t blame them for feeling that way. I’m sure I would have felt the same if I was dropped off to do something I didn’t enjoy every day. For me though it was hard work trying to motivate those who were clearly disinterested. I was clearly never going to follow in my brothers footsteps and become a teacher. I just wouldn’t have been able to cope.
The experience sounded perfect on paper for my application to Brevik and it clearly did the trick as the manager wrote back a few weeks later to confirm he was happy for me to join the supervisor team. It was a voluntary thing, so I had no expectation of getting paid but a three week trip to Sweden sounded good to me. Kat helped me out with the logistics of it all and I flew out to Stockholm in July. From the capital I booked a fast train down to Soderkoping where someone was waiting for me to take me to the camp.
As soon as I got there I knew I was going to love it. It was set right on the archipelago surrounded by woods. The camp was a mini village with wooden huts for dormitories and a food hall which acted as the central point. There was also a relaxation hut full of sofas that the supervisors could chill about in at the end of the day. The piece de resistance though was the sauna. This was a few hundred metres away from the main site in a wood. It was right next to the water where there was a mini pontoon with a diving board. It was so good. We ended up there most evenings to relax with a couple of beers and a dip in the water.
I was sharing a bunk bed with a younger lad. He was a really nice guy and we got on well. He’d lived in the US for a few years with his parents and so had a think American accent. He’d been to Brevik a few times so helped me get to know the rhythm of the camp. It was well organised. The meal times were set and there was a schedule to follow every day which outlined the activities. These covered all sorts of things, mainly designed to give children life skills. There was a whole range of things planned including a first aid course, raft building, outdoor cooking, furniture making…you get the idea. As a supervisor my job was to look after one of the groups along with another senior person. It was a lot of fun and it was great being outside. The weather was good for the majority of the time, with most days being sunny and warm.
In the second week the build up to the canoe hike started. I was going to be looking after a group of eight children along with another supervisor called Lotta. The premise was simple. We had to organise rations and camping equipment for eight days out in the archipelago. We could go anywhere, the route was entirely up to us. We were given a map so we could figure out the manageable distance over the eight days and each day’s intended journey to the next suitable camping area. I couldn’t wait to go, I was like a kid in a sweet shop.
Luckily Lotta had done it before so she had a vague idea of the route we should take and where to head for. It was a good job she did because on the hike I discovered that my map reading skills are not up to much. I managed to get us lost on the first day after making a wrong turn in to a dead end stretch of water. To be fair it was pretty difficult to distinguish one island from another and match the landscape to the map.
I should have known better though as I had previous. During an end of term activity day at school I’d got a group of us lost during an orienteering exercise. On that occasion we had been dropped off in Cannock Chase in Staffordshire with a map and compass and were told to find our way to various meeting points to get back to the school minibus. It had a competitive element to it as we were up against some other teams from the school. The objective was to be first back so being the competitive soul I am, I grabbed the map and set everyone off in completely the wrong direction. We didn’t make one of the meeting points and got completely lost. Well done me.
So it wasn’t a huge surprise that Lotta took control of the map from that point on. The first night was a bit unusual in that it started to rain. We selected our location to pitch up for the night and dragged the canoes out of the water. As it was raining we decided to use the canoes as walls and dragged a tarpaulin over the top as a shelter. This was fine in principle until the mosquitoes figured out our plan. The night was spent swatting them away as they did that irritating things that mozzies do of buzzing right next to your ear just as you are about to go to sleep. It wasn’t the best night’s sleep I’d ever had and I got bitten to pieces, but it didn’t matter, I was out and about on my Swedish adventure.
Once we were up the daily ritual began of making breakfast and hot drinks with the camp stove, packing our stuff up and heading back out on to the water for that day’s journey. Every day was an experience. I’m sure it wasn’t true but every time we found a new island to stop at for a rest or spend the night it felt like we were the first ones to have ever set foot on it. Everything was so unspoilt we all felt like explorers finding new habitats.
To avoid the mosquitos we took to sleeping in the open air on rocks, even if it was drizzling a little bit. It was such a nice feeling waking up at sunrise and looking out over the water, it was so peaceful. Throughout the whole eight days we hardly ever saw any other people. It was so strange to have that feeling of detachment from the rest of the world. We had no phones or anything electronic, we were completely cut off from everyone. The days rolled into one another and far too soon we were making our way back to camp.
The canoeing itself was very leisurely due to the size of the group as well as the varying ages and abilities of everyone. It was only on the last day when we ran out of food that we needed to put on a bit of extra pace to ensure we could get to a shop on one of the islands before it shut. Apart from that it was a gentle paddle.
It was very odd making it back to camp and back to civilisation. We hadn’t had any luxuries whilst we were away, so simple things like sitting on a chair felt weird. Having not had a shower or a shave the whole time, most of us made a beeline for the shower block. I managed to get in to the largest shower room I could find, stripped myself naked and got myself ready for the best shave of my life. Just as I was lathering up my patchy ginger beard the door of the shower room opened and one of the female supervisors started to walk in. We both froze as we realised I was standing there starkers and I’d accidentally forgotten to lock the door. She made a hasty retreat and I quickly slammed the door shut, locking it behind her. Liberal as the Swedes are, I’m sure she really didn’t want to see a pasty naked English bloke with a dodgy ginger beard standing in front of her. I would say I was mortally embarrassed but to be honest I was more interested in getting in to the shower. We muttered apologies to each other when we bumped into one another later on that day as the rest of the camp took the mick out of me relentlessly.
It took a few days to adjust to being back at the camp, but after a couple of great night’s sleep in a proper bed everything returned to normal. I didn’t always sleep brilliantly whilst I was there. Nice as my roommate was, he tended to need music to fall asleep. Every night he would put his Walkman on to drift off. Being used to living in the country side at my parent’s house in Whittington, I struggled to get to sleep if it wasn’t quiet. It was particularly bad in this case as his choice of music was the soundtrack to Pocahontas, the Disney movie. Much as I like films, having power ballads played to you on loop night after night was a bit annoying. It was either get to sleep before him, or stick the pillows over my head to block out Pocahontas’s dramatic warbling.
I’d also made good friends with Kat’s sister, A-C, who was also staying at the camp. She had a very similar sense of humour, so we got on like a house on fire. She was also game for a laugh which came in useful for the camp talent show that was planned for one of the nights. I introduced her to ‘The Dribble Twins’.
This was something that my school mate Meadie and I had come up with on a school camping holiday to Guernsey. These were annual summer trips organised by our school art teacher after the term had finished. It was ten days away with school mates and was very cheap. Ideal for skint teenagers growing up. Although it was a school organised trip, it was fairly relaxed. The teachers who went also wanted to enjoy themselves so there weren’t too many rules, particularly when you were in sixth form or if you had actually left school. Most evenings we would join the responsible adults in the teacher’s tent for drinks and stories. It was a good laugh.
The Dribble Twins arose from Meadie and I mucking about one day whilst in the beer tent. I can’t exactly remember how it started but it probably stemmed from having a mouth full of beer and laughing. That soon progressed to having a big swill of beer and then having your arm pumped to spit the beer out, showering the other person. Not that dissimilar to Scott Mills’ Innuendo Bingo game on Radio One. Expanding this concept in to some kind of routine, we did it at the camp’s talent show to music. There were lots of variations on the dribbling, from leg pumps, nose twists and ear prodding. It seemed to go down well, which was a bit of a surprise because we thought we were the only ones who found it funny.
So with no other discernible talent to lean on, A-C and I decided to do the same at the Brevik talent show. It went down like a lead balloon. I don’t think the joke translated to a bunch of Swedish kids. But A-C and I had fun.
The rest of the time at Brevik went far too quickly and before I knew it I was back in Stockholm getting ready for the flight home. Kat’s brother, Patrik, lived in the capital, and he kindly offered to put me up in his flat for the night as I had an early flight home the next day. I turned up on his doorstep and within minutes we were going out for drinks. As with his sisters, he was a good laugh. He introduced me to a few of his mates and we sunk a few beers before going to the local theme park. I can’t remember how many rides we went on but there were rollercoasters involved. Not the best of rides after a few drinks. If I wasn’t drunk before going on them, I definitely was when I got off. We got back to the flat very late. I probably managed 2 hours sleep before stumbling down to the taxi taking me to the airport the next morning. The flight home was a blur and I must have stank of beer. I felt sorry for the lady and her daughter who were sat next to me, but they got their own back by eating my food whilst I was fast asleep.
It was the end of a great few weeks in Sweden.
I haven’t been in a canoe since, but to be honest I’m not sure I could have topped that experience anyway, so it’s probably for the best.