44th Norwich Scouts – Danish Jamboree Experience

“An amazing time, with memories that will last a lifetime”

“A fantastic experience”

“Thank you for a great trip”

These are just three of the comments made by participants after earlier this summer a party of 19 Scouts, Young Leaders and Leaders from the 44th Norwich Group took part in the ‘Spejdernes Lejr’ Jamboree in Denmark. There we joined nearly 40,000 other scouts and guides from Denmark and from around the world, for a fantastic nine-day experience. The trip took 2 years to plan and prepare and as the end of the school-term approached the excitement mounted!

One of the reasons we wanted to go abroad was to broaden our horizons – to get experience of another country and of a different style of scouting. This was a great success. We were hosted at Spejdernes Lejr by the Sct. Clemens Gruppe of scouts, from Randers in Denmark. They were extremely hospitable and our two groups got along really well. The young people camped, shared tents and worked in joint patrols together. Many lasting friendships have been made and we hope to host the Sct. Clemens scouts on a return trip to England.

The Jamboree was enormous – far bigger than camps most of us had ever attended and there was a fantastic range of activities on offer. Our scouts enjoyed, amongst other things, an overnight expedition, rafting, gourmet campfire cookery, a science show, a video-game competition and ‘the Beast’ (the world’s largest bouncy castle)! On the way home we visited Legoland in Billund, before hiking back to the airport for our return flight.

Everyone also really enjoyed the more ‘back to basics’ approach of Scandinavian scouting – where, for example, food is all cooked on campfires and camp equipment is built from scratch. We all learned a lot from our Danish hosts and acquired tons of good ideas that we’ll bring back to our Group.

You can find lots more stories about our experiences on our Facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/leopardscouts44/

6th October 2017 News, Scouts