New Year's camp on Pōnui Island

This past week Martin and I were on Pōnui Island, where we went for Scripture Union Bible Study Camp in January 2022 and 2023.  Scripture Union does four summer camps back to back on Pōnui: New Year's Camp (better known as 'family camp'), camps for the younger and older halves of high school, then Bible Study Camp.  This year we wanted to go with friends from church who have kids, so we were at New Year's Camp - which turned out to be more different from Bible Study Camp than I'd expected.  It was much more of a holiday, with only 3 teaching sessions and one church service - as opposed to 11-ish teaching sessions and 'testimony time' each evening at Bible Study Camp.  Other differences included there being at least one significant 'fun' activity each day (camping out under the stars, a picnic at another bay, a concert, a disco etc) and access to boats was strictly limited to when there was skilled supervision - although you could swim any time you reckoned there was enough water.

It was lovely to be back on Pōnui.  It's such a beautiful place.

 

There are 'wild' (non-farmed but pretty tame) donkeys on the island - and one of them had a foal while we were there.  I think this photo was from the day after it was born - such a delightful surprise to see it :-)

 

This year we set up the tarpaulin as an awning across the front of our tent, which worked pretty well.

Just before Christmas I had Covid, testing negative on December 23rd.  I got much less sick than last time (hurrah!) although I was still pretty weak, and I was very pleased to be given paxlovid again.  I was testing daily for the 8 days after I tested negative (in case I got a paxlovid rebound)...

...and on day 5 - the first full day of the camp! - I tested positive again :-(  It was quite a surprise.  For all that I'd known it could happen (about 20% of people who take paxlovid get a 'rebound*' infection), I wasn't really expecting it.  I'd also thought that paxlovid rebounds generally only last a day, so got quite the shock when I tested positive again the next day.  Further reading revealed that paxlovid rebounds average 3 days, and can last up to 10!!!  I had only brought 6 RAT tests with me (enough for me to test through to day 8, plus two for M in case he got exposed by someone else).  That turned out to be vastly insufficient as I ended up testing positive right through the camp, plus ideally Martin would have tested frequently, too: we were isolating as well as we could from each other, but were still interacting as he was bringing me meals etc.  And we'd only brought one toothbrush, which we did our best to sterlise between uses with boiling water!  I'm pleased to say the bristles survived this treatment :-)

*My understanding is that the antiviral medication hammers the virus, but if it doesn't get it all then that little remaining bit can grow and cause a new infection, and it takes your immune system a while to get up to speed and squash it again.

Tiger: my isolation buddy :-)

That first day when I tested positive was really hard.  It was a big adjustment for both of us, in terms of what to expect from the camp.  Martin had to get used to be my only source of food and drink (so needing to be moderately interruptable), as well as no longer having a tent to sleep in (he decamped to the boat shed).  I had to miss out on catching up with people, as well as the various activities of the camp.  When we arrived at camp I'd been delighted (and amazed) to realise that a bunch of friends from my distant past were there - two girls from EU (the Christian group I'd been part of at university), a girl I'd taught Sunday School with, and a flatmate of a good friend of mine - none of whom I'd seen for at least 25 years.  There was even a chap I'd been in an orchestra with back when I was 16!  It'd been so exciting to think I could catch up with them all, and now I was isolating instead.

However, when I tested positive again the next day (and then learned this could go on for up to 10 days!), I had a bit of an attitude shift.  If this was going to be my holiday, I may as well enjoy it!  And there definitely are worse places to be isolating than Pōnui!

And I realised I didn't have to totally give up catching up with people - so long as they were OK with meeting up 2m apart outside, we were pretty OK.  And everyone was happy to do that, with one particular friend coming over for chats at least once every day :-)  But I did quickly figure out that people needed to come to me: where our tent was was pretty quiet, but it was too hard to stay 2m away from everyone in the more crowded areas.  And my friend who was there with a toddler found it (understandably) too complicated to visit, so sent me deliveries of yummy snacks instead :-)

Martin and I resting 'feet to feet' on the boat shed porch in the heat of the afternoon

Martin joined my brief hike up the hill behind the cookhouse.  Pōnui is astonishingly steep!

Our tent is at the extreme left of this picture, about a quarter of the way up.

Looking down on the cookhouse and kayaks from the hill

  

I'd also taken some sewing with me (the makings of a set of sashiko coasters for my lovely dentist, who's getting married in March), but hadn't really expected to get any done.  In the end, 5 out of 6 designs were embroidered on the island, and the kowhai and pōhutukawa ones were designed there as well (source photo for the kowhai; the pōhutukawa was based on many images as well as observing some on the island).  As well as being a fun project to work on, it was a good conversation starter :-)

This trip was the first time I tried out the "reusable tea bag" I'd made for camping.  It worked out well - crushes down to next to nothing, dries in no time, and contained loose leaf teas nicely :-)

I think the yellow flower button looks very cheerful against my electric blue travel mug :-)

I spent probably a day and half feeling pretty ill with the infection (and was pretty low energy the whole time - and still!), so spent a lot of time resting.  I did go for a short swim most days, and a couple of short exploratory walks.  On one of those I encountered a very spiky shrub on the edge of a paddock (the island's mostly a bunch of sheep farms) that had gorgeous tiny flowers and luscious-looking berries.  I later ID'd it as African boxthorn: an invasive pest with edible berries that apparently make great jam :-)  I would have tried eating the berries if I'd known!

Aren't the flowers pretty?  They're well under 1cm across.

A ripe berry, maybe 15mm long and such a bright red!

One evening Martin and I went for a wander along the beach at around 9:30pm and saw phosphorescence (a first for me!).  He'd been told it often occurs there.  As the little waves broke they gave off sudden flashes of bright slightly purplish light.  Very odd, and so neat to see!

On Wednesday the whole camp headed off on the barge to another bay for a picnic.  I stayed back, along with a couple of families who were in isolation for tummy bugs, and a handful of teenagers who couldn't be bothered with the picnic.  It was a small enough group that I felt OK to join the others at lunch (outside, distanced), which was lovely :-)

The beach the others went to for their picnic

The water was so still where they were!

Not so much where I was - check out the angle on the laundry!  It was so windy back at the camp.  The laundry was flapping vigorously all day, as was our tent and its awning.  I was seriously over the noise by the end of the day :-(

And then on Thursday it was back home.  I'd used my last Covid test on Wednesday afternoon in the hopes of joining dinner on the final night (I'd decided I didn't really want to go to the picnic anyway, as getting my regular rests there would have been difficult) and that had still been faintly positive.

Heading off on the barge - a handful of people were staying on for the 'Junior' camp that started the next day.

On the barge home I couldn't really socially distance but did wear my mask - and there was heaps of air flow!  On arrival home I tested negative (hurrah!) after 5 1/2 days of isolation, but Martin got a faint positive and is now in isolation himself :-(  Maybe he caught it right at the beginning before I knew I was positive and took a while for the infection to settle in, maybe our toothbrush sterilisation wasn't good enough, maybe we got a bit slack with our isolating - who knows.  I'm sad he's sick, but at least we don't need to isolate from each other this time round (just from Sarah), which makes logistics a lot easier :-)

I'm pretty worn out from the two infections back to back (and pretty sick of isolating after doing that twice back to back as well!) and am not up to much beyond short walks and gentle concentration right now, but hope that will improve as I continue to rest.

This camp was more expensive than Bible Study Camp (which was astonishingly cheap), but still a fairly affordable holiday at $550 for the two of us for 6 nights (including food, the barge travel etc).  And not too bad from a carbon point of view - I estimate it generated around 110kg CO2e, about half of which was from eating way more meat than we usually do!  If we had friends with kids to go with we expect we'll go again, although if it's just us we may well go to the Bible Study camp next time instead.