Their story, in their words….
We set ourselves the challenge of going to wales by ourselves for 5 days to camp, and hike the Brecon Beacons. We both have never done anything like this before on our own, except for Olivia’s past experience with DofE. However, we are so proud that we were able to complete this challenge and come back from it we new memories and a new outlook on life as we now know what we are able to achieve if we put our mind to it.
Over the 5 days (2 travelling and 3 Hiking), we were able to hike 28 miles, which isn’t as many as we would of hoped but we are still proud. During these walks we were able to climb up to the peaks of Myndd Troed (which was 609m high), Pen Allt Mawr (which was 720m high), and Mynydd Llangorse (which was 506m high). When we reached the top of these mountains, the feelings we got were so overwhelming as we knew what we had just achieved. The views were also incredible. At first, we both were very confident In ourselves that we were going to complete this challenge with no problems, as we believe we had planned for everything. However, we did have a few challenges we needed to overcome along the way.
All our problems started from Aldi in Abergavenny, when we had completed our food shopping, we had planned to get a taxi to our campsite. Although, when we rang for a taxi, it turned out no one was travelling out that far, so we had to improvise and carry all our super heavy shopping, to a bus stop 15 minutes away and get a bus to Crickhowell, where we were then able to get a taxi to our campsite. Another problem we faced was the weather, during our hikes, we got drenched, which we didn’t mind, but when it came to cooking dinner later those nights, we were unable to light our trangia to cook our food as it was unable to stay alight in the poring rain, but luckily a nice man in the pitch next to us offered us to use his shelter to cook and eat our food under. Finally one other problem we had to overcome was the routes we had planned. Some of our routes we followed were a great success, but some happened to be very overgrown. We did not let this stop us though and we proceeded through these paths, coming out of them with stings and scratches all over our legs.
Despite all of the challenges we had to face, we are very thankful for this opportunity the Mark Evision Foundation was able to give us, this challenged was able to push us out of our comfort zones and make us have a better outlook on life. We have learnt a lot of new skills such as problem solving and to work better as a team. We will both never forget this once in a lifetime opportunity.
