TRAVELING FREE! Can you entertain yourself without money?

The Astra Alaska project involves many different people from all different nationalities speaking different languages living in a VW bus on top of each other. Now you can imagine there's lots of stresses involved in this kind of project and the ways we deal with it are spontaneous dancing, group hugs and lots of affection from the world's greatest explorer. Keeping your sanity in the Kombi is a delicate balance between alone time and working together. So when we were on Vancouver Island and we found that all the activities such as paddleboarding were too expensive for us to do on this budget trip, it was the perfect opportunity for a team building exercise. What do you think? Not a chance. So we've decided to do a team building exercise. We're going to try and build a raft from whatever we can find in the bush here using this Eno tarp. We will be floating on this lake, Lake Kennedy. The first job was to appoint a team leader. Sarah here has been appointed team captain, project leader of raft building. Are you up for the challenge, Sarah? Yep. I'm going to wrap around the sticks and just make them float. Is that right? Good to know that the vision is really clear before we start out. It didn't go as smoothly as planned in the beginning. We've got one stick and a wrinkly tarp. I don't want to be a team leader anymore. I resign. As if Kombi life isn't already a big enough team building exercise, we can't even close our tool box without a team effort. That's what happens when you get five people and a dog and a Kombi. Japanese Jack thought it'd be a good idea that we had fuel in our belly for the day ahead. Power to the Jack. Unfortunately, the Kombi blender was broken that day. I'm actually a four time Finnish champion scout skills. I shouldn't just tell people I'm a Finnish champion without telling the sport. We thought it'd be a really good idea to follow the advice of British legend Ray Mears. Most of you guys probably don't know he is a legend. The man is a living legend. Most of you guys probably don't know who he is. He's a British celebrity that's very famous for talking about bushcraft. Always important to handle your machete whilst wearing flip-flops and no top. We basically spent three hours picking up sticks and turning it into a floating donut. There was a lot of other people on the lake while we were building the raft and you can imagine how it looked like. We were just assembling sticks together and they would ask us what are you guys doing building the raft? Isn't that evident? It wasn't. Once you have your young and supple sticks arranged and intertwined into the appropriate size donut shape, build a platform for you and your bravest friends. Then place the platform on top of your donut thingy and move the entire structure, and I use that word loosely, on top of your tarp. It's a good idea to put some soft vegetation between the pointy sticks and your tarp to prevent it from tearing. How confident are you Sarah? 100%. Jack, how confident are you? Why not? Confidence that I actually sink. I have every confidence that we're going to sink. We're definitely going to sink. You know everything went really well up until the point where we thought Ray's probably got this wrong. I'm sure what he meant to say was you want to flip the donut upside down and try to float on the raft upside down. Then we decided that it would be a good thing to listen to Ray and we flipped the raft around and epic success. Ray knows best. You can't imagine the feeling that you get when you are floating There was a few points during the day that I was very tempted to just unstrap the surfboard from the roof and just go paddling around on the lake on that, but that kind of defeats the purpose of the activity and the fun that we had and we all had a really good time doing it. Different kinds of meat. This is new. Sometimes it's not the succeeding of a task that you set out to do that's important but rather the act of doing the task itself. Would we set sail on the high seas on our unnamed vessel? Probably not, or at least not without some hefty modifications anyway. For us it was never about building something perfect that would last forever but rather building something together that we would remember forever. The open road has the habit of throwing together the strangest mix of people. We all come from different lands and many speak in different tongues but we are all bonded by our united passion of exploring, discovering and growing. We might be miles away from our family and friends but here right now we're a Combi family and we treasure every single minute of it.