Over the Holiday break, Olivia Gray, Katie Hawkins, Devon Wilson, Asia Tapealava, and Stella Wispinski travelled with a combined Queen's and King's group to Cambodia and Laos on a World Challenge trip for three weeks.

World Challenge is an organisation that teams up with schools to get together a group of students and travel overseas on an expedition. On this trip all the choices are made by the students, from organising the transport to food choice. This was a unique, eye opening experience for each student, and the memories made on the trip will never be forgotten. The lead up to the expedition was around 1 1/2 years in advance, this allowed us to have plenty of time to fund raise and plan out different activities and areas we would like to visit. However, it didn’t feel real until we were actually in the airport and had to find our own way around and onto the plane. 

We had a King's staff member Ms May accompanying us and to help us if we got stuck. However, it was up to the students to take initiative and work together in our 30 hours of travel time to find our way through the four flights that took us to Vientiane, the capital of Laos. 

Throughout our expedition we visited many temples, and learnt about the main religion of the country which was Buddhism and how that links into the community and way of life. The cultural experience was a once in a lifetime opportunity, there were many things that left us shocked and amazed, and a few things that took a wee bit of getting used to. An example of this was the toilets, where the toilet paper went in a bin beside the toilet. The road rules were also very different. There was often no actual lines on the road and this meant that for the majority of the time the main road rule was “If it’s bigger or louder than you, it has the right of way”. The night markets were also very chaotic but a very cool experience. 

We spent three days in a village just out of city of Vientiane. Here we learnt a lot about the culture of Laos. We spent 1 ½ hours of volunteer work each day at the school helping to build a concrete brick wall. After this we travelled mainly by public bus down through Laos and into Cambodia. The public bus was also a surprising experience, where often the bus would stop outside a line of street stalls and people would rush on to the bus with some interesting looking food to sell to us. Something which was a little bit different was that there was not much leg room in the buses, as people in Laos seemed to be overall slightly shorter than those in the likes of New Zealand and other western countries. We found that we didn't have much room for our knees to fit. The travel days were long and hot and there wasn’t air conditioning on all of the buses, so the travel days were hard. Once the bus broke down and we were abandoned on the side of the road with a few other groups of strangers while we waited for a bus to come pick us up. Although times like these were hard and stressful, we were able to come together and enjoy the experience with each other by getting to know each other, have a bit of banter, and appreciate the beautiful country around us. 

In Cambodia, on Christmas we spent the day at the elephant sanctuary This organisation takes in elephants that have usually grown up in cities and have often been used as entertainment, and have been trained using torture methods. The elephants that come to the sanctuary do not know how to “be an elephant”, they have often just been fed human food, like rice, noodles, coke, sometimes alcohol, and they don’t even know how to bathe themselves. This was an amazing organisation to visit and see how they work with the elephants to teach them just to be able to live in a healthy natural environment. We also went on a four day trek through the Kulen Mountains. This was a challenge, as it was around 30 degrees every day, but the scenery was amazing. The first night was especially cool, as it was New Year's Eve and we were camping at the edge of a cliff which had a beautiful view over the country. A few of us stayed up until midnight around a campfire to say "Happy New Year", then another group got up early on New Year's Day to watch the sunrise. 

Overall, the experience is one that none of us will forget. Throughout the trip we were challenged in many different ways, but had to work together as a team to organise every activity and travel choice for each day. We have all taken away an appreciation for everything we used to take for granted back home in New Zealand, as well as an admiration for the countries of Laos and Cambodia. This trip was the most amazing experience for all of us and we all would 100% recommend this trip if it is offered to Queen's again.