So many South Pacific images from our school rugby tour will keep me warm on the sportsfields this winter: standing on top of glaciers in New Zealand admiring the stunning views, great times with the new friends we made, hard fought battles on the field of play, our final day in Fiji when we visited the orphanage for disabled children we had raised funds for and finally standing looking out over the bay that evening thinking “My God, we actually managed to do this”.

The idea to tour the other side of the word began at a pub in Hammersmith 16 months earlier. Jessie Coulson, Latymer school’s new head of rugby, turned to me and another coach and said: “What we really should do is take these boys to New Zealand and introduce them to some real rugby culture.” I remember thinking that we were hard pressed getting pupils to matches on a Saturday so how on earth were we going to get a tour party across the world? There were hundreds of questions to be answered: where were we going? how much would it cost? how many boys would we take? which charity would we support? Pretty soon we had an outline of what was going to happen. Latymer would take two teams, so that meant 35 boys, to Singapore, New Zealand and Fiji on a trip lasting a month. We would play ten matches, and the squad would be mainly made up of Year 11 and 12 boys, as it was designed to build for the future of the rugby team.

Used to travelling alone with my Lonely Planet guide to help find accommodation as I went, I had to reprogramme my mindset to forward-planning mode. Organisation was put in the hands of a local travel agent, Edwin Doran, which had organised and costed it all. They seem to have the market on these types of trip as we kept meeting up with other groups that had used them.

The real problem wasn’t the organisation of the actual trip but the fund-raising to make it all affordable. An entire year of my life was filled with jumble sales, formal dinners, raffles, car washing and anything else that was going to raise money. But we succeeded. The final cost was pound;1,950, for meals, excursions, kit and anything else the pupils might need.

There are two sides to a tour like this, the sporting and the cultural. Both of these were of the highest quality. On the rugby side, we won some, we lost more and we learnt an incredible amount. The most infamous match was against Te Kuiti High School in Waikato. It began with the only Haka, the Maori war dance made famous by the All Blacks, we would see from any opposition. What followed was the hardest match our players had ever played in. However, the true spirit of the Maori players was shown afterwards as they gave our boys the best reception of the tour. Our boys were put in billets with their opposition players and so got to see how they lived. The coaching staff had also made sure that nearly everyday there was an activity, be it zorbing (rolling down a hill in a ball filled with water) to a visit to glow-worm caves (more enjoyable than you think). My favourite was the helicopter ride onto a glacier in Franz Josef but everybody took home countless memories.

My least favourite memory came courtesy of Air Pacific who decided that it was more important to fly out a group from an oil company. They made us split the party over four separate flights (which included me and two boys having to wait 24 hours to get to Fiji). A few words of advice: always make sure on this type of trip that you get a group check-in, get to the airport nice and early and keep all the pupils’ passports on you.

One image that I will never forget is on our last day of the tour, when we were in Fiji, and visited the orphanage that we had raised money for. Everyone was shocked to realise that in each classroom there would be at least two different classes. The boys tried to find any money they had left to give to the children and teachers, simply because they had to. After a long tour it just put in perspective how lucky we had been to experience this trip of a lifetime. In the run up to the tour, everyone asked themselves if it would be worth it, but looking back there can be only one answer, yes.

Mark Finnemore coaches the senior rugby team and teaches maths at Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith, west LondonEdwin Doran Travel Agents, 54 King Street Twickenham. Tel 0208 288 1000 Fax 0208 288 2955 Email ian.barton@edwindoran.webmail.com