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We’ve Just Bought Tickets to Australia!

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 31st and thinking I would spend New Year’s Eve alone, thousands of feet above ground. I remember arriving in Hong Kong on January 1st 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 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 travelled 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, there were tons of backpacker hostels, ranging from old converted houses to huge modern buildings. Forget about privacy when you are sleeping in a 12-bed 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 travellers on working holiday visas simply took up residence and lived in a dorm instead of renting an apartment. Some dorms were entirely populated with these working travellers and, at times, it felt like sleeping in someone else’s house.

I turned 20 in Sydney. A day before, on March 20, 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, 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 Qantas, 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 Qantas incident (emergency landing blahblahblah).

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

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Zhu

French woman in English Canada.

Exploring the world with my camera since 1999, translating sentences for a living, writing stories that may or may not get attention.

Firm believer that nobody is normal... and it’s better this way.

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