Little and Large Down Under #1: Remind Us Why We\’re Doing This Again?

Remind Us Why We’re Doing This Again?

Making the decision to take the plunge and plan our trip to Australia was a difficult one for us, and not necessarily the one experienced by most people doing this sort of thing. We’d known since January that David was going to be made redundant, but this only actually happened in April. Although mentally prepared for this, what we weren’t prepared for was the state the job markets were in and the paucity of jobs at his level. Crunch time came when David didn’t get a job which perfectly matched his skills because they were able to employ someone less experienced for considerably less money. The penny then dropped that we might need to try another game plan.

The prospect of selling the flat and living on friends’ floors until the job market picked up held little appeal, and the feeling of wanting to escape grew and grew for both of us. And so this is what we are doing – maybe this travelogue should be called ‘How to make the best of a crappy situation’? If the above circumstances hadn’t come together we now wouldn’t have this amazing opportunity to do something we kind of thought we were a bit too old to do, and take the sort of career break that you only hear about other people doing.

Making the decision hasn’t been easy and there are a lot of reasons why what we’re doing might be considered foolish (after all, we’re taking a risk on things being better when we return), but at the end of the day the reasons for going and the world of possibilities that might greet us when we get there far outweigh our worries!

We have been fortunate, in a way, that David hasn’t been working as he has had the time to thoroughly research our trip and now probably knows more about rucksacks, travel towels and Mekong river crossings than is healthy! Jenny on the other hand, has only just started to look at guide books as we know we are definitely going in six weeks – she thought that looking beforehand would mean that we ended up staying!

We don’t really have much of a plan. We do have a list of places we want to go to and things we want to see but don’t really know exactly when or in what order. The outline is currently to arrive in Sydney and look for a few months’ work. Then over the course of the year we want to travel up the East Coast, through the Red Centre and up the West Coast, as well as doing a tour of New Zealand so that David can take part in some Kiwi-style activities such as zorbing, cave rafting and tandem skydiving. We also want to swim with dolphins and gape at the Lord of The Rings scenery. All this will likely be interspersed with work (hopefully!) so that we don’t eat into our savings too quickly.

When our year in Oz ends, we’d like to fly to Singapore and then spend a couple of months travelling overland through Malaysia, Thailand and Laos before flying home from Bangkok in time for Christmas! Then the job search will begin and real life will intrude again.

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