Some­where in the Out­back, Aus­tralia, Spring 2003

My mem­o­ries of Aus­tralia are a bit fuzzy. It’s been seven years after all.

I remem­ber board­ing the plane in Paris CDG on Decem­ber 31^st and think­ing I would spend New Year Eve alone, thou­sands of feet above ground. I remem­ber arriv­ing in Hong Kong on Jan­u­ary 1^st and stay­ing there for a week before catch­ing another flight to Auck­land, New-Zealand, where I had picked Feng up who had just arrived from Canada.

We had bought a really old car in New-Zealand. It had bad brakes smelling of rub­ber and a crack in the wind­shield but we still man­aged to drive around both islands for a cou­ple of months, before fly­ing to Aus­tralia. The two coun­tries were very dif­fer­ent but I liked them both. They were like two sib­lings with dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ties: New Zealand was the mature older brother, phleg­matic, prac­ti­cal and out­doorsy; while Aus­tralia was the younger sis­ter, out­go­ing, sunny and some­times irresponsible.

Around Queen­stown with the car we bought, New Zealand, Early 2003

My Eng­lish wasn’t very good at the time and it was my first time back­pack­ing in the English-speaking world. I had strug­gled with both Kiwi and OZ accents. I was also new to the “back­packer indus­try”, pre­dom­i­nant in Aus­tralia. Tons of twenty-something Brits take a gap year before going to uni­ver­sity and spend time in Aus­tralia on a work­ing hol­i­day visa. Some parts of Mel­bourne, Perth and Syd­ney were almost 100% British—they were work­ing in restau­rants, bars and hos­tels by day and drink­ing their money by night.

Aus­tralian hos­tels were one of a kind too. We had pre­vi­ously trav­eled exten­sively in China and Latin Amer­ica, two places that were still not that pop­u­lar with young back­pack­ers. There were few hos­tels and accom­mo­da­tion tended to fall into three cat­e­gories: fam­ily hotels, uni­ver­sity rooms or cheap dilap­i­dated hotels.

In Aus­tralia, they were tons of back­packer hos­tels, rang­ing from old con­verted houses to huge mod­ern build­ings. For­get about pri­vacy when you are sleep­ing in a 12-beds dorm and shar­ing the bath­room and the com­mu­nal kitchen! It was an inter­est­ing atmos­phere though, with lots of booze, lots of drugs and lots of every­thing else you can imag­ine. Some trav­el­ers on work­ing hol­i­day visa sim­ply took up res­i­dence and lived in a dorm instead of rent­ing an apart­ment. Some dorms were entirely pop­u­lated with these work­ing trav­el­ers and, at times, it felt like sleep­ing in some­one else’s house.

I turned 20 years old upon arriv­ing in Syd­ney. A day before, on March 20^th, I dragged Feng to the huge protest in Syd­ney to con­demn the war on Iraq, the day after the inva­sion had begun. I can’t believe it’s been seven years… and that protest­ing is still rel­e­vant today regard­ing the cur­rent situation.

On Decem­ber 5^th this year, we are head­ing to Aus­tralia once again, until mid-February. We need to travel badly, like two junkies look­ing for a fix. We need to escape Canada and the cold win­ter. We need the free­dom and the care­free life of those who hit the road. I don’t know where this trip will take us. We have no plans, as usual.

We just bought the tick­ets a cou­ple of weeks ago, almost on a dare. It took us the whole evening to fig­ure out the best itin­er­ary and we decided to fly the Pacific route through L.A. We also picked Quan­tas, because we wanted to fly a big plane. You know, a big plane like… er… the A380.

And of course, later that night, we heard about the first Quan­tas inci­dent (emer­gency land­ing blahblahblah).

I’m not even wor­ried. Ready or not, we are going on Decem­ber 5^th. Fol­low us Down Under soon!

Related arti­cles:

1. The New OZ
2. Liv­ing Out Of A Bag
3. Syd­ney, Australia
4. 10 Stuff We Learned in Australia
5. Out­back Queensland