Louis Davis was in the middle of the bush in the Marlborough Sounds, in a tent he had erected, as the rain pummelled down. It was August and freezing cold, and all the 27-year-old had to keep him going was an apple, a carrot and a biscuit.
Davis, of Ngāpuhi, from the Far North, was on the toughest stint of the three-week Outward Bound course: the much-dreaded two-to-three-night solo expedition, when participants are dropped in an isolated spot with a tent and little else.
The experience was transformative. Davis, who attended the outdoor education centre in 2020 on one of its Ka Mahi scholarships, says: “I remember thinking, ‘I’ll never be as cold and as miserable as this’, and as soon as I said that, the snow came.
“But most of the time, as I sat there by myself freezing in the tent, I thought about my sister, who I hadn’t spoken to since I was a teenager. I thought a lot about her, and I sobbed a lot. Since I’ve returned [from the course], I’ve chatted with her every week.’’
Davis, who manages the residential halls at Massey University in Palmerston North, is one of 70,000 alumni whohavebeenthroughOutwardBoundsincethe campus opened in Anakiwa, at the head of Queen Charlotte Sound, in 1962.
Outward Bound is a global movement founded in Wales during World War II by Kurt Hahn, a German Jewish educator who had fled the Nazis, and British shipping magnate Lawrence Holt. The original aim of
