Day 6

Today the Ventures and Rovers are off on their overnight hikes to the Lotchenpass and Hockenhorn Peak while the younger Scouts remain on site crate stacking and running the assault course. Friday sees the scouts head off on their overnight to the Uschien Hut and the climbing workshop.

After many requests, pleadings and finally threats of no watching the World Cup final we have managed to get the Scouts, Ventures and Rovers to write a piece for the blog, enjoy.......

UPDATE No. Awesome!

We're totally shocked to be here, lolz. We've gone hiking, climbing, team building and today we are going to Bern. The best activity so far has been tobogganning. It was "FUN!", "Great" and "totally gnarly".

There are loads of other groups here including Americans, Sscottish, Dutch and Norwegian (so we've been practicing our accents). They are a good laugh. They have taught us some new games like Ultimate frisbee and Camps. Most of us are going on an overnight hike tomorrow, which should be fun (as long as we can make it!)

Bye for now!

2nd Cork Ventures.

Day 5

1/2 way through the week already (and this german keyboard is slowly driving me mad trying to find the various characters on it). The time is zooming past. Today we are off to Bern to do the whole culture thing. It's a lovely city perched high above a bend in the Aare river, once you don't mind several statues of a duke killing a bear in different poses or the ogre eating some children (have social services been informed?)

Most of the buildings are built in stone after they discovered that the wooden ones didn't like the large city fire they had in the 15 century.

Of course no visit to Bern isn't complete without a visit to the Bear Pit or now that they have upgraded it, the Bear Enclosure which houses 3 brown bears but no Goldilocks as Gilly declined the chance to star in that role :-)

Day 4

We spent the day out on the mountains hiking, a low level one up to 1850 meters and a high level one up to 2250 meters and along some ridges. Admitably we did use a cable car to get some of the initial ascent done.

It was also a very special day for Oliver as it was his 15th birthday, so to celebrate this we presented him with a KISC t-shirt at the top of the cable car ride and of course we had cake after dinner back in KISC. It wouldn't be a birthday without cake :-)

The days hike also gave everyone a chance to find out just how fit they really were and whether ankles and knees were going to be capable of the various overnight hikes later in the week.

Day 3

Was spent on site trying to "drain the brain", get through a spiders web blindfolded (Gilly was so photogenic she made it onto the weekly KISC slideshow on their webpage), rescue a message from an "Acid River" which considering said river was a glacial melt stream just above zero C it had pretty much the same effet on your feet if they went in!

The afternoon was spent climbing Jacobs ladder, think of a ladder built for a giant and where the rungs get further apart the higher you climb.

In the evening we did our bit for the Irish Tourist Board at the International Evening. The smoked salmon, West Cork cheeses, soda bread and shortbread shamrocks went down well amougst the Danish, Americans, Spanish, Dutch and Finnish groups.

Day 2

A lazy lie in, didn't have to get up until 8am :-). After breakfast it was on with the boots and off on a hike up to a galcial lake at 1600 meters. After much puffing and panting and wondering why we didn't take the gondala up we finally reached it. Spectacular and freezing cold as Robert found out when he went for a dip. The alpine cows were pretty friendly as well!

Then is was onto the Rodlerbaun for some slip sliding away, think alpine tobogganing but in a metal chute instead of an ice one. Once we got the hang of the track it was a case of seeing if we could get the toboggon around the sharp bends without having to following the efficient Swiss signs of "BRAKE!".

We took the easy back down and used the gondala to get back to the village followed by a quick explore of the town and back to KISC.

Day 1

5am is the sort of time you should hear about but not experience but 22 scouts, ventures, rovers and leaders did just that on Saturday as we gathered to get on the coach to take us to Dublin airport.

After a coach ride, a plane jouney and a further coach ride and 12 hours of travel it was great to arrive in KISC and finally get the hiking boots off.

We were given 5 bunk rooms in the Old Chalet including the Irish Room. As scout camps go this is definitly luxury. As it rained our first night here there was nothing nicer knowing that we didn't have to crawl into tents in the wet.