The School trips.

The first trip - round the Coromandle Peninsular.

The above is Cathedral Cove in my Home town.

That picture was a shock for me when it started staring out from office desktop lock screens.

On the clear star-studded New Year’s night of 98, I spent the night in that cave with a 33-year-old fun time gal¹ from Norway.

I made it romantic as all get out, with ten tall candles stuck in the sand and a nice big blanket.

Decades later when I saw that picture while working in corporate America and tried to tell fellow cube peeps of that wonderful night, pointing out exact areas on the screen where the good times were had, they would get uncomfortable.

But I didn’t care. I wanted them to think of me and my Norway Gal every time their computer booted up… I wouldn’t say Norway Gal though I would use 90s Kiwi slang for a Nordic. “UCTEN BUCKEN”.

“Yeah me and this hot blond Ucten Buckten…”

“What is an UCTEN BUCKTEN…?? The confused Californian would ask…

“You know … a Norwegian or Sweedish…

“You can’t say Ucten Buckten, in America.”

“But can’t I say anything I like in America? Isn’t that what this county is all about?

The Freedom of speech thing?”

I act dumb, they keep explaining why freedom of speech isn’t really freedom of speech.…

I get them to admit that NZ is freer than America because I can say Ucten Buckten there, and people laugh instead of getting mad and giving hour-long lectures at work to the immigrants instead of making their rich boss richer like they are supposed to.

Good times…

I digress…. this story is about school trips.

Mine was a rural school in New Zealand.
The school was what was called an Area School. Which meant ages 5 to 17/18.

If you lived in this town from a young age you went to school all through your childhood and teens with pretty much the same people.

This created a certain demented situation where you all wind up kind of like a giant gang of brothers and sisters who mostly hate each other. Which becomes awkward when you want to start banging each other. So you mostly don’t. The girls in your class are going for guys 2 -3 years older than you so your shit out of luck anyway. ( See the story series “Operation Finnish Princess for more details on this).

So at 12 years old, your class goes on a lord of the flysish camping trip around the Peninsula our town was on. It’s a rural but super touristy place in summer.

The trip was called the “Round the Peninsula trip.” Genius.

Here’s the map.

The red line follows the road we went on, traveling from campsite to campsite.

The X marks the location of the Story “The Girl From the Island” that took place 5 years later…if you are so interested to read that one.

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Now in retrospect, these trips were often towards the end of the year, and on any misbehavior, the culprit would be warned that they were putting their trip at risk!

If the whole class was getting rowdy we could all be immediately smashed under control by the teacher yelling “At this point, NO ONE in this class is going on the trip!

Bad kids would toe the line right up when they were ON the trip when they would go all out, in an explosion of pent-up naughtness! Its this naughtiness I will be detailing in these storys as well as some of the more interesting or funny things that happened.

I will start with the first trip.

THE ROUND THE PENINSULA TRIP.

Ok so I do remember being a weird loner on this trip.
I had come back to this school at 12 years old just for the last few months.

And I was a Crazed Mystic Shaman.

The reason for this is that my mother in her great and deep wisdom thought it was a good idea to send me to boarding school for two years ( As detailed in the Boarding School Saga Stories) while she lived in an ashram at the top of the Ganges river in India.

On returning to New Zealand she then thought it very wise to take my 10-year-old sister and 12-year-old me, on a Ten month New Age journey with an American group run by a Hawaiian Kahuna and a Native American Medicine woman.

A New Age super quest for rich white seekers. I found out later that this all-inclusive new-age super quest was about 100K.

I just may be getting into the “100K spirit quest journey” game one day as the Guru… Ill let you know…
How this worked was that we traveled around New Zealand and Australia and lived with Native tribes. In this case the Maori of East Coast New Zealand and the Aboriginal tribes of Uluru and Mullumbimby Australia.

Months and months of shamanic quests, Sacred Mountain climbs, pray fests, screaming heals, Naked fire dances, sweat lodges, Moonlight silent walks, solitary bush sleeps, waterfall jumps, Icy River freezy plunges and pray stick workshops left twelve-year-old me forever changed.

All of this directly after two years of a very strict boarding school where I went from my Bed to class to the rugby field on a loop. The monotony only broken by the occasional vicious corporal punishment².

By the time I got back to the human realm, I was in some kind of super whackadoodle woo woo spiritual orbit.

I had done shit and seen shit that few twelve-year-olds have, but you know what… It was kind cool and fun. The food was good and the Maori and Aboriginal kids were really fun to play with. Sometimes the adults were gone all day so you were free to wander about in the outback and get bitten by inch-long ants.

But what I really LOVED was watching grown adults absolutely lose their shit, while doing these spirit quest things.

The high-strung yanks particularly.

I still find that to be one of my favorite pastimes.

But anyway… I’m at this school now and Im as weird as fuck because I keep saying shit like “I can sense that you're crying inside, David. If you were just truthful with yourself and others you would heal”

The response to my weird shit would be “Fuck off with your faggot talk, homo!”.

I learned fast to keep my stupid shaman mouth shut. I was in a new tribe now.

And so with this new tribe of kids I went on the trip. Driving in the bus to various campsites and camping. While the parents and teachers cooked for us. It was like scouts but with no activities and the teachers and parents drinking and blazing a little weed at night.

One of the campsites, Fletcher bay at the top of the Peninsula.

I remember a lot of beach walks and bush walks. This I was good at.

I decided I was just going to spend my time hiding up trees and observing the other kids… to try to learn from their behavior and figure out how to fit in.

Two things I remember.

David ( Who I knew was crying inside ) mixed up a bunch of aspirins in a bottle of coke and drank it, in a sort of weird pill overdose fake cry-for-help thing. He made a big deal about it and then just spewed and cried. And then faked losing his voice and became a lame mime for two days.

When some well-meaning kid told on him, the teacher asked if he was ok.

The kid says “I guess” and the teacher just shrugged.

The other crazy thing that happened on this trip was, that while I was hiding up a tree, I saw one of the bigger twelve-year-olds throw something in the bushes.

I yelled down “Yo! What was that?

And he looked up and yelled

“A condom. I just fucked Jessica.”

A condom? Fucked? What the fuck is going on? Arent, we supposed to be twelve.

I hadn’t gotten the memo that this is rural NZ and the Maoris grow up way faster than whitey.

I imagined this taller tough half Maori kid on top of Jesica the tall Maori girl in one of the tents.

Having sex right after talking about the A team and eating burgers at the picnic table with the other kids…

Starwipe to two years later Jessica is one of FOUR fourteen-year-old girls in my class, with big pregnant bellies trying to lean forward far enough to do their maths…

One was a mentally twisted pointy-faced white girl who was always telling sexual jokes, the other three were Maori girls.

They would stay in school, preggers till about 7 months in, then disappear.

Then a few months later they would roll up at lunch time with the baby to show everyone.

A simpler better time I recon.

I just was in the mash with the rest of them…

Tune in next time for the next school trip story. 14 years old now and going on the Ski Trip! ( The pregnant girls didd’t get to go… in case you were wondering )

END

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1. A young woman who engages in partying and romantic liaisons.

2. physical punishment, such as caning or flogging.