One of my resolutions for the fall was to post regular updates on our ongoing season, but alas, this quickly fell by the wayside. Anyway, I figure it would still be worth sharing some of the highlights.
In every sense, this was our best fall season ever. We facilitated 30 programs for more than 1,300 students, from international schools across China and Hong Kong. We had 28 full-time staff (and a handful of part-timers), which enabled us to achieve a ratio of better than 7:1 for most of our programs.
Most of the trips took place in familiar locations and hewed to familiar formats, which we have nonetheless continued to refine by swapping in new activity sites and activities, hotels, etc. We also facilitated a handful of new trips, including a 5-day Silver IA adventurous journey for 35 Dulwich College Beijing students. The trip was 5 days long, and involved more than 250KM of cycling through Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, and Liaoning. The theme of the trip was The Great Wall, and the route wound over and past numerous restored and original sections, including the end of the Wall in Shanhaiguan. Students camped three out of the four nights of the trip and prepared most of their own meals. Best of all, the weather gods smiled on us throughout the trip in the form of bright blue (pollution-free) skies and cool temperatures.
Another new trip for 70 students from YCIS Shanghai began with a two-day IA practice hike in the hills south of Hangzhou, in which students cooked and prepared burritos and guacamole (easily worth its own blog postJ, followed by 3 days in the always-lovely Thousand Island Lake. On this program, we utilized a new site for handicrafts and team-building activities in Lion City, a reconstructed Old Town on the shores of the Lake (the original city is still intact, 30m below the surface). We also scouted a brand new high ropes site and concluded the trip in a luxurious 5-star hotel in Chun’an City. It’s probably worth mentioning here that the high-speed train to Qiandaohu is now open, reducing the travel time from Shanghhai to a brisk 2.5 hours!
Other highlights from the fall include the roll-out of our new online portal and registration system, which streamlines and centralized pre-trip planning and communication between KA staff and schools/participants. The portal is currently available in Chinese and English, and there are plans to expand it to Korean in 2019! We also redesigned our internal webapp, such that all of the Standard Operating Procedures that we have spent years painstakingly developing, our now instantly accessible to all of our staff, along with our activity lesson plans and risk management procedures.
I’d like to conclude this update by thanking all our staff, without whose dedication and hard-work, KA wouldn’t be anything close to what it is today. I’d also like to thank our clients – old and new – for working with us. We hope that participants found our trips as rewarding and memorable as we intended, and we look forward to working together in the future!
