My day in the Hunger Games

THERE was real blood, sweat and tears, as it turned out, but I came out alive and ready for anything life could through at me.

“I VOLUNTEER as tribute,” I told my editor, not knowing quite what to expect of my Hunger Games-style day out, but assuming it would be a breeze.

Instead, there was to be real blood, sweat and tears, but I came out alive and ready for anything life could throw at me.

In other words, I crawled bruised and battered back to my office desk and watched Justin Bieber videos on repeat while rocking back and forth and devouring biscuits until I felt safe again.

While my day-to-day life consists mostly of brunching, boozing and whining about going to the gym, like many over-confident action movie fans, I had a sneaking feeling that if thrown into a life-and-death situation, I would definitely kick some serious ass.

So I readied myself to put on a catsuit and transform into Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow. The reality wasn’t quite that.

I was dressed as pin-up computer game character Nathan Drake, complete with cargo pants and natty checked scarf, and received a warning that things were about to get real. It was less heartbreaker than heart-attack.

Drake is the daredevil Indiana Jones-type hero at the centre of the Uncharted series, the fourth instalment of which was released by PlayStation yesterday.

How I expected to look.

How I actually looked.

He’s the male Lara Croft. Would I be the female Lara Croft? I had the ponytail, gun and bra reinforced with steel ... OK, I had the ponytail and a blueberry muffin back-up snack.

As I was whisked over Sydney’s CDB in a helicopter, all I could do was rehearse those Buffy Summers moves I remembered from my teenage years when I was fat and lazy but had one very important talent — I was 100 per cent committed to the study of trashy American TV.

Dragged out of the helicopter and on to a quad bike, I wondered if now was the time to confess to how many driving tests I had failed, and how I felt like I was going to roll off the road and into a ditch.

Before I even had a chance to request a machine gun, sword, or at the very least one of those Amazon fighting staffs that the sidekick in Xena: Warrior Princess wields like a pro, we were hiking up a wooded hill for the training level, run by Glenworth Valley’s Bear Grylls survival experts.

It was here that the first blood was shed, as leeches attached themselves to my ankles and started sucking and — worst of all — sliding THROUGH the tops of my sneakers into my flesh.
I pulled them off the slimy things and gathered dry tinder as instructed. “It’s not that kind of Tinder,” our guides helpfully warned us, although if I get into that fashionable new virtual reality sex, I might well request Nathan Drake.

We were instructed to make fire, something I’ve attempted many times on camping trips with no success. I prepare to freeze to death in the wilderness. How did Katniss Everdeen become the “girl on fire”? How have I gone from The Hunger Games to Wolf Creek in less than an hour?

My existential crisis is solved when I am handed a magnesium flint and steel firestarter and a cotton wool ball. Survival will be a cinch as long as I carry all those things with me at all times.

Ice cool as I grip on to my bike in terror.

My handbag is about to get even more back crippling. Potassium permanganate will do too, I’m informed, which is lucky because I could probably shove that black powder in the make-up bag and use it as a substitute eyeshadow.

There’s just time for some delicious lunch of mealworms (“nutty”, translation, “gross”) before we’re climbing up a rockface on a vine, abseiling down a cliff and squeezing through a crevasse so narrow I realise it’s luckily that lunch was just insects.

Then it’s back on the quad bike, driving through a creek and back on the helicopter to escape the bad guys.

Pretty much a superhero now, I’m choppered to the Blue Mountains, where my sidekick engages in some martial arts while I rock-climb away as fast as possible (not very fast). This is where more blood comes in — and theoretically the tears if I weren’t literally as strong as Rogue from the X-Men, and just as good at flying away from things, as long as I’m in my new helicopter — now the only way I travel.

The latest instalment of the award winning Uncharted series from acclaimed developer Naughty Dog, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, is now available to buy exclusively for the PlayStation 4 system.

Well, I had a mean-looking scarf.