By Claire of Southwell

A Northsiders point of view.
So far the Venture has been fantastic. It’s been full of fun, adventure, freedom and excitement. We’ve had the chance to go all over Perth and see the things that we want to see, with the people we want to see them with. We’ve been on trains, busses and even the ferry to the zoo, all for free with our lovely Transperth cards on our ID tags.Rachel and I have become self appointed Contingent Leaders, and are doing a pretty fine job of it, filling up the Contingent HQ fridge with milk and then getting ACT Contingent ‘badges’ and distributing them.
On pre tour we all became great friends. I know I came to Venture with only 2 friends and now I’ve got a lot. We dyed hair and went to Adventure World. We went to Cottesloe beach and learned how to get from Salter Point Scout Hall to Canning Bridge to Perth City to Cottesloe beach and back by the public transport system.This helped a lot with my expedition, and even though there was a guy from Perth in my team, I still believe my knowledge of the transport system helped a lot. There was a lot of running involved, up hills, around the Freo cemetery, carrying 12.5kg of flour, up stairs to catch busses and to beat the other teams. At the end of day 1 my team was in the lead! Unfortunately we didn’t keep this up (except for when we caught the 98 instead of staying on the train to get to Freo) but we tried our hardest. Our gnome “Bitch” stayed with us the whole time, except for when the rovers stole it to leave in a canoe and then in a park. There were a lot of gnome jokes within the Amazing Race contingent. I gnome the team that won deserved it.
Expeditions also saw new friendships, and I have heard a lot of people say they didn’t want to leave their expedition because they didn’t want to leave them. But the ACT contingent got back to the Venture site after expeditions and was ecstatic to see each other. There was plenty of running and hugs and screaming. Somehow we have all found a balance of seeing expedition friends and ACT friends.
Offsite activities have been good. Some people have done Paintball and now have massive bruises, people have been to the zoo and seen elephants, back to Adventure world to finally go GoKarting, spent the day at Rottnest Island and Fremantle, and even been scuba diving! You have the freedom to go offsite even if you haven’t booked an activity for that day. Rachel and I are planning a trip to the Aquarium tomorrow which takes me through a suburb I used to live in!
Tomorrow is the last day, and although we are all very tired and missing our families, friends and pets, we’ve all made great friends (and significant and insignificant others) which we are all very sad about leaving behind. Hopefully most of us will stay in contact with these people, and they will stay lifelong friends.
We have all talked and we think that people who pay out Venturers are very foolish because as Venturers we have the opportunity to do things like the Venture and everything it offers, which is not something a lot of youth organisations can provide.
=D (sorry it’s not really all that epic. It’s 10:30pm and we’ve just done State Vs State... which we did pretty awesome in!)