This is a wonderful 3-day trip that I've done over the weekend, which is actually apart of the Education in Natural Landscape class. At the beginning, we decided to take this class, only because it allows us to travel with low prizes and with the teachers' guidance. After the personal experience, I started to be fascinated by the nature and to understand the true meaning of learning about the relationship between human and nature as well as how we should learn from it.
Some friends of mine have taken the same trip a couple of weeks ago. They warned me that it was going to be a physical trip. Well, not really. It is the first real camping that I've ever done in my life. However, I don't feel anxious at all, when leaving the comfort zone that I am used to. With the thinking pattern of an engineer, I clearly know how to learn from the nature, accept new things quickly, reapply the learned knowledge to the nature and get accustomed to the environment. As a result, I do not really mind not taking the shower for three days; I do not mind drinking the tab water; I do not really mind eating some dry bread everyday instead of a formal meal; I do not really mind going to the toilet which is so gross and smelly; I do not really mind sleep in the sleeping bag and in the tent, even when it is raining outside and you feel everything is wet. Most of my group members are American and there's even a girl who goes to Berkeley. Most of them have plenty experience of camping and hiking. The only difference between camping in US and Australia is that there's no bear in Australia so that you do not need to put your food on a tree...There are, of course, some girls who are afraid of dark, and who take a lot of personal things with them to let them feel that they are living at home. This actually sets the wrong context for them. They do not have the mood to be truly immersed in the nature, and they are afraid of tiredness and dirtyness. As for us, we just eat when we feel hungry, we just sit on the grass or rock when we feel tired. We climbed the mountains, higher and higher for a better view.
I also gave a 10-minute presentation regarding questions as how I can do to protect the nature, how much do I know about this area and how does my study link with the nature and what is my former presonal experience with the nature. Most of them study arts subjects and I am the only one who deals with technical stuff, which makes my presentation especially appealing to most of them. The lecturer said that I did an excellent job and there's another girl coming to me saying that she really loves my presentation. I feel happy about it, and I cannot understand why people become so nervious before they present and they intended to write everything they want to say down. It is actually very cool, when a group of people sit down on steep rocks in the windy and rainy weather to discuss about human's approach to the nature.
This is the fisrt time that I have to realized that there's actually something special about Australia--people here have the opportunity to return to the nature and enjoyed the outdoor instead of living in the "box", in which the people in the city do.
