I roll over to escape the lump of wood that's been sticking in my back for the past 10 minutes and my arm comes to rest on something not entirely made of sleeping bag material. It's a slug. A round, fat, healthy Welsh monster that has made its way up my insulation mat and is about to make the journey headwards.
As I flick it away I notice that it's begun to rain. "Ho hum," I think to myself. "We'll be OK in our trusty fern shelter." Two hours later, considerably wetter and with a lot more on my mind than slugs I am lost in some woods in the pitch dark with a virtual stranger, with nothing but a head torch and sodden sleeping bag for protection. "I know the way back to base camp," the stranger had, rather misleadingly, told me. I, with next to no sense of direction, trusted her implicitly and followed.
What was I doing in the middle of the Brecon Beacons exiting a handmade shelter with a complete stranger? I have asked myself similar questions ever since my return.
The UK Survival School is based in Hereford but runs courses mainly on private land in the Brecon Beacons. I had signed up for a weekend survival essentials course, along with 10 other strangers. A keen camper, I have always managed to camp within the boundaries of my comfort zone. Always with a car, always with spare water, heaps of teabags and the option of a nearby town for fish and chips. It was time, I had decided, to learn how to do it properly.
In the absence of a suitable or willing friend to undertake such a mission with and loath to chance it alone, lest the course be filled with sneering Duke of Edinburgh boys and strapping, freckly women, I logged on to companions2travel.co.uk and found myself a mate.
Companions2travel was launched in July 2004 and since then has acquired nearly 8,000 members. For £25 you get to choose whom you holiday with by matching your profile and needs with existing users or posting holiday ideas. These are standard dating agency procedures but Companions2travel is no dating site. Typical users range from 80-year-old Dennis Blairman from Middlesex to Sarah Double, 30, my companion for the weekend, and users can specify whether they wish to find a specific trip or companions, people with shared interests or a shared age group. Users can also advertise on the forums for group activities.
I found Sarah by visiting one of the site's messageboards and simply asking, "Does anyone fancy a trip to the Brecon Beacons?" Several people (male and female) replied but Sarah seemed keen, with an adventurous spirit and an impressive list of travelling experiences. Initially we didn't have to exchange email addresses and messaged safely through the website until, tiring of logging in and out, we spoke by email and phone and arranged times and costs.
Bags packed, tickets bought, I was en route to the best part of Wales, trying to match up train connections and furiously texting my new friend about why she shouldn't have packed a tent, as it didn't say so on the kit list, when it dawned on me that I would be unable to order her around. Apart from the inherent dangers of travelling to the back of beyond with someone you've never met, you have to undergo a temporary personality change before you are confident enough to let them see the real you, by which time of course it's too late and you've already ordered their starter and pudding while they're in the toilet. Having travelled mainly alone or with my patient boyfriend, I was going to find it very hard to bite my tongue and go along with someone else's wishes.
Luckily for us, the course entailed mainly shutting up and listening to instructions and though we were thrown together in a potentially tense survival situation, there was the everyday activity of staying dry and safe to take our minds off the possibility of falling out.
The weekend essentials course was run by the perfectly named Ged Lawless, a cheery, ruddy-faced ex-paratrooper from Burnley with a penchant for naff jokes and an apologetic insistence that he was un-pc and offensive, even though I saw no evidence for this over the whole weekend. His outdoor knowledge was without parallel and his amazing knack for injecting information while we weren't looking has resulted in me being able to recognise the fungus of the common ash (Latin name dardinia concentrica and very good for firelighting in case you were wondering) and correctly apply a dock leaf (dab, don't rub). And I'm sure I don't even remember him telling us either of those things.
Our fellow survivalists were an eclectic mix of old and young, male and female, couples, siblings, all of them refreshingly urban or, at least, non-competitive. I had agonised all the way down that Sarah would turn out to be an Amazonian expedition leader with several years' experience in the bush but she was just like me, liked meeting people but prone to shyness; up for an adventure but liable to cry if it got too hairy. We easily paired up with another 'couple', the male element of which was there to teach his brother a lesson next time he picked on him, and embarked upon our fateful shelter-building experiment.
When, several hours later, soaked through, lost in the forest with no sleep, we were on our way back to the base camp to dry out round the fire, I asked Sarah if she was having a good time. She blearily called back: "Yeah, it's amazing. Thanks so much for asking me." I knew I (and Companions2travel) had made the right choice.
The spirit on the course was upbeat and friendly; in no small way this was helped by the school's planning and Ged's easygoing manner. A quite strict kit list was, it turns out, there for guidance and complete failure to light a fire with a bit of tree bark and a bit of metal was met with chuckles and friendly assistance. A midnight plea for more dried milk, rather than a SAS-style bark of, "We had nowt in the Gulf", resulted in surreptitious sachets being passed over the fence from his tented enclave. It's no wonder that the ASBO kids he regularly takes under his amply-tattooed wing return home with a whole new perspective.
So if I had hated Sarah, I would have probably been OK anyway. Companions2travel's advantage is that we were able to correspond quite extensively before our trip, we were able to choose each other based on what we saw our ideal travelling companion to be and we were able to do so with the impunity to say, "I can't be bothered doing that," without upsetting anyone's feelings. We could leave without ever crossing paths again but safe in the knowledge that no lifelong friendships had been ruined. As it is, the 'reunion' camping trip some of the group have planned later in the year looks more than likely and my companion and I will almost certainly be sharing the same muddy path again.
