My school trip

As the 16 of us huddled in the back of an open-air truck teetering off the Andes, I closed my eyes and thought of my mother. The joke email I had sent days before, with the subject line: ‘Urgent: your child is in hospital’, didn’t seem so funny now we were taking tight corners along a mountain edge. Even if we did survive our Peruvian trucker’s alarming driving down steep winding roads, there was every chance the police would stop the vehicle and find a bunch of Scottish teens in the cargo container where there should have been animal feed.

It wasn’t supposed to have turned out like this. My school’s three-week expedition to Peru — back in the summer of 2006 — had been pitched to parents as the perfect way to boost their children’s CV by laying the groundwork for a Duke of Edinburgh award. For the alternative kids, it was also the only option available after a lack of sporting ability had ruled out the Australia hockey and rugby tour.