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“Tim Tams!” The chocolate biscuits were the prize for the first food challenge Barbara Kendall’s team won after nine days of eating only rice, dal and coconuts. From left, Barbara Kendall, Athena Angelou, Gary Freeman and Shane Cameron.
After a long reign of leadership, island themed challenges, and earning $5000 for Surf Lifesaving New Zealand, Stanmore Bay’s Barbara Kendall was eliminated from TV’s Celebrity Treasure Island.
While viewers saw her leave on the September 17 episode of the show, the Olympian board sailor says she has been back on the Coast for “ages.”
“We finished filming on June 18,” she says. “I kind of forgot about it, but now I’ve been watching along with everyone else.”
Barbara outlasted 10 celebrities and made it to the final six, which equated to 15 days on the Fijian island.
“Once you are eliminated, you walk over a bridge and turn right to go to a resort instead of left back to camp,” Barbara says. “Going into the resort after how we had been living was like walking into a vortex that took you to a strange land, it was very odd. The first thing I did was call my husband, because I hadn’t spoken to him in over two weeks, and then I took a very long, hot shower.”
During the game, celebrities were limited to one solar powered shower per day, which Barbara says was always cold. The only other amenity was a portaloo.
To have food other than rice and dahl, the tribes had to win team face-offs. Besides some coconuts they won in a challenge, this is all Barbara’s tribe, Mako, had to eat for nine days.
“We were competing in up to three challenges per day, so unlike shows like Survivor, we didn’t have any time to forage for food. The dahl upset many of our stomachs, so we couldn’t eat that, either. I had diarrhoea for the entire duration of the show which really wore me down. That is the biggest lesson that I have taken away from the show: how important nutrients are for your brain cognition. Towards the end, I couldn’t calm down and I felt paranoid and nervous about everything, so I knew I couldn’t perform.”
It took two weeks for Barbara to recover.
“My girls were laughing at me when I got back, because I couldn’t string a sentence together properly.”
While watching herself on TV has been “confronting,” Barbara says seeing what unfolded in the opposition tribe, and keeping the show’s result a secret, has been entertaining.
“I went on there to put myself out of my comfort zone, and now my curiosity about what it would be like has been cured.”
The show finished last week.
