If you’re looking to book your expedition with Camps International this month we have a fantastic prize draw on offer for anyone who confirms their place by the end of the month.

Book any Life or Gap trip with Camps International this month to be in with a chance to win £100 Cotswold Outdoor gift vouchers!

Save yourself £100 of essential travel equipment. Just choose your Gap or Life destination and book before the end of May 2012 (5pm GMT on 31st May 2012) to be included in the draw.

As usual with our monthly prize draws, we will choose the winner from a hat and post the video on our Facebook page so that you can see the draw. The prize draw will be held on the 1st June 2012.

So what are you waiting for? Enquire now to find out more about the trips available to you, or book online now! You can also give us a call on 0844 800 1127 to have a chat with one of the team. This prize draw only applies to new Gap and Life bookings made during April 2012.

Patrick Wall one of our recently returned Camp Kenya Gap Year volunteers offered to write a blog for us about parts of his trip. Here is the first instalment (I say first as it puts pressure on him to write more). So thank you Patrick and we look forward to more!

An Englishman, Australian and a Welshman decided to climb a mountain… Granted our other volunteers were doing it as well, but we set out to break the Camps record of 2 hours 23 minutes and get up Mount Kasigau in the Taita hills in under 2 hours.  After being told that this would be no small feat by numerous members of Camps’ staff, locals of the region, the guides and our own group! Myself, Tom Giles and Sam Purnell set off with our guide Manuel to try and set a new record.

Manuel immediately knew he was in for a rough time, as the concern on his face grew grave when we hadn’t slowed down for 20 minutes. The poor man thought that he was just going to have another leisurely tour to the top. Little did he know the feeling of determination inside us. We were taking the climb at full speed, shooting up the first third of the climb with minimal breaks and apart from the odd clash with a large and petrifying spider in the trees it was a relatively uneventful climb. The weather was with us throughout our whole climb, and after sacking off the beautiful views and photo opportunities in favour of the record we had trekked for 55 minutes for Manuel to tell us that we were three-quarters of the way to the top. By this point the pace of the climb had begun to take a toll on us and the legs began to lag. However this filled us with renewed vigour and led to us running the next 100 metres… A mistake of epic proportions! But we pressed on with a real feeling now that we may not just beat the Camps’ record, but also the fastest ever time of 1 hour 40 minutes. Manuel, by this time was unfortunately far behind. But with Giles leading the way up the path with like the devil was after him we approached the final 150 metre scramble with an hour and 30 minutes  on the clock. We hit the final hill running but it wasn’t long before we were on our hands and knees using whatever nook and cranny we could to hoist ourselves up. The taste of achievement was in our mouths and we walked to the summit three abreast like a very cheesy scene from a movie, but we didn’t care. We had done it! We had managed to make it up in a new world record time of 1 hour, 35 minutes and 47 seconds.

Much to the disbelief of Manuel who came panting up a few minutes later. It was hugs all round while collapsing for the next 30 minutes in the sun to dry off while the rest of our group made it up. A special mention should go to them as well as everybody from our group made it up faster than the previous Camps’ record. But the Englishman, Australian and Welshman hope that our time stands for many years to come!!

Patrick Wall

Camps International will shortly be celebrating 10 years of operating responsible school and gap year expeditions across the globe. What started in 2002 as as a small operation on the coast of Kenya has grown to include camps in Borneo, Cambodia, Tanzania, Uganda and more recently Ecuador. Traditionally the summer season was the reserve of UK based schools, however as the message about our unique brand of responsible tourism has spread so has the location of travelling schools. In the last few years we have welcomed students from Australia, China, Vietnam and even Kenya. Dipesh Pabari our Africa Operations Manager was asked by the Association of International Schools in Africa (AISA) to write a piece on Responsible school tourism for Connections magazine. He has since delivered this article as a talk at the Annual conference in Nairobi. See the article below.

“As we wound down our summer season with a big smile of satisfaction and some relief, I could not help but think how middle class high school Kenyan students would fit into a program like ours. Most of our hip youth loathe the thought of spending a long weekend in ‘shags’ let alone spending a month planting trees and digging toilets. Then I wondered whether this lot who spend their holidays hanging out in Nairobi’s shopping malls would feel about spending a month in the south of France picking grapes in a vineyard or working on a sheep farm in the UK? Would this appeal to them?

Over the course of two months we hosted about 650 students from the UK in Kenya and Tanzania who spent a month in country working hard and playing hard. I recalled scenes of 30-40 pairs of hands digging away under the baking sun as they eagerly tried to complete their target on a trench in yet another neglected primary school on the periphery of Mwaluganje Elephant Sanctuary. I remembered another group who sang through the entire six days of laying blocks for a classroom in a little primary school tucked away on the South Coast and I smiled thinking about the team who refused to stop working until they finished breaking the old concrete of a massive water tank for cattle that was to be restored for elephants on Rukinga Wildlife Sanctuary.

This was my third full-blown season with Camps International – a responsible Travel company that operates its own camps and projects across the Coast Province in Kenya and around the Arusha-Moshi region in northern Tanzania and on the east in Tanga. With the primary clientele being under 18 high school students from the UK, one is immediately inclined to wonder how you would convince a teenager who has just completed high school to spend their first month of freedom taking bucket baths and digging holes in the African outback.

And equally important, is the enigma that 95% of these students actually fundraise and work odd jobs for over a year to save up and come out for these trips. This is not mommy and daddy paying to get rid of little Johnny for the summer. This is someone who believes that this is the right thing to do: a young mind who chooses to spend a month working on various projects that they may or may not see to completion on a continent that they have never set foot on and in the case of Kenya, probably the only thing they have heard is that people were hacking one another to pieces over some rigged election less than two years ago.

Expeditions such as the ones Camps International offer are part of a growing trend across the globe. For those that work in the industry, you will be very familiar with the ‘Gap Year’ industry which is all about offering young people a useful holiday which gives them exposure to new cultures and societies and hands on experience with various ‘problems’ from wildlife conservation to community development in parts of the world like ours – the so-called Third World. In the UK, taking a ‘gap year’ has become so much the norm that one would be considered weird if they went straight to University out of High School.

Like any other trend, the gap industry has not been spared from the critical gaze of the media, which keeps a tab on just how these expeditions are packaged. It’s a necessary evil that keep its eye on the profit moguls for like anything else that operates in regions like ours, it is so easy to turn pictures of swollen bellies and fly infested children or elephants grazing peacefully on the savanna landscape into profit.  As a Kenyan, I loathe what Africa has become in the western eyes (more so because we allowed it to happen) and thus approached entry into the responsible travel industry very cautiously.

Having worked in the not-for-profit sector for the past 15 years, words like ‘sustainable’, ‘eco’, ‘responsible’ ‘community’ had long since become a cryptic crossword divorced from the reality that they are used to describe. Most people who are not in the NGO are very skeptical about this do-good industry but that is another discussion. Suffice to say, that from where I am sitting now in a company that employs over 60 people and spends millions of shillings building schools, creating income generating activities for various local youth groups and women’s groups, repairs water tanks for elephants, builds new homes for widows and the elderly, plants thousands of trees and still manages to make some profit – I would like to think that those countless workshops and conferences that led to trends like ‘responsible travel’ and ‘sustainable tourism’ have actually played their part in creating what I hope one day will be the norm and not the exception.”