Life at the Bay

Summer is here and we're super excited! We've opened one holiday week for the upcoming October holidays and we're about to turn things upside down!    Upside-Down week: 1-8 October   Get ready to take a look at the world from a whole other perspective! Come join the madness as we switch up and turn things upside-down at Sugar Bay!    Highlights: Stunts & Skits Show Night (Instead of Skits & Stunts) Evening Programs held in the Morning Lunch for Dinner Wear your Clothes Inside-Out all week Inverted Party Night (Thursday instead of Friday) Excursion to Jump for Joy - Indoor Trampoline Arena How much will it cost to see things from another angle?     Book now & prepare to turn things upside-down!    Become a subscriber to our Sugar Bay YouTube Channel and check out our Holiday Camp Highlights to get you excited for this camp.

We caught up with one of Sugar Bay’s very first counselors, “Hoova”, formally known as Baden Dowie. Hoover was with us for seven years and helped turn the Sugar Bay dream, into a reality. This fun and fantastic counselor is now happily married for seven years to Catherine Dowie, and they are parents to three children; Jack (4), Mackenzie (2) and Ewan (6 months).    Q & A with Hoova – Baden Dowie 1. How did your journey at camp begin? “ I arrived at Nic and Zoe’s home one rainy Sunday morning in March 2001. I turned up with a backpack, guitar and in an insecure, playful, bold and nervous twenty-year-old body. However, so excited to be part of building South Africa's first American styled children's holiday camp. Sugar Bay was just a construction site when I arrived; there was only an empty hall, steal frame structures, no pool, no grass on the sports field and no cabins either. I was privileged to have seen camp in its early stage. I worked at camp full time fr...

Having turned the dream of creating a ‘children’s paradise’ into a successfully running business, Sugar Bay’s Founding Director, Zoë Ellender, shares why the benefits of American summer camps inspired her to start her very own camp in South Africa. “As a child, I was given a lot of opportunities to go on holiday which didn’t require spending a lot of money. We would go to our grandparents on a little farm in the Free State, in Clocolan, which is along the Lesotho border. I would be surrounded by my older cousins who were great role models and we would be busy from sunrise to sunset; climbing mountains, building forts, jumping off cliffs and just going on escapades. When I began soul searching after realizing I was unhappy in my legal career, I cast my thoughts back to these moments in my life when I was happiest. I began recapturing my youth and parts of these holiday experiences. This is how my love for camp began, in a healthy environment, without any distractions, ...

Just as how a normal day in the office can easily turn into a stressful one, what you may refer to as a normal day at school for your kids can be just as stressful.    Take a look at these examples of stress our kids are faced with at school and see the reasons why camp is the perfect antidote to social stresses at school.    Social Standing    Children are expected to maintain a certain image at school in order to secure a reputation. Social standing at school divides kids. Kids who dress well are admired as the “Trendsetters”, kids who excel at sports are the “Jocks”, kids who are great at socializing and have a multitude of friends are the “Popular kids” and intellectual kids are known as the “Nerds”. If your kids don’t fit into any one of these categories at school, they’re usually the “Outcasts”. This is why our children are always trying so hard to fit in, which can be very stressful as not all of us are fashion forward, good at sport, grea...