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WARNING: The following post contains many repetitions of the words ‘proper’ and ‘normal’.
I’m now home. Have been so for a week now and thought it’d be worth dribbling on for one more hit. The last couple of weeks I was hanging out to go home. It didn’t help that I met another Hobartian in San Diego and we proceeded to spend the whole week yabbering on about all the things we were looking forward to about going home. The days ticked my slowly, Hawaii was a great diversion, but before I knew it I was on the plane headed for Sydney.
The two days I spent there were kinda surreal. Familiar place, normal language, and normal money – I forgot about all the colours of AUD after 2 months of green money and Aussie coins are so big! I had a proper café brekkie, all these things I’d forgotten about came flooding back, crusty bread, how coffee was meant to taste, how the bacon was cooked and the flavour of an Aussie snag.
Then I was home. I’ve told lot’s of people it’s weird to be back, but it’s not really – it’s exactly how I remember it. I’m glad I came back at this time, with Christmas, the Taste of Tasmania and the Falls Festival on – it really is the best time of year to be home. It’ll be a different story when I start work I guess, although I’ve been told I’m expected to be useless for the first month, works for me – bring on charging time to Admin.
A couple of people have asked me if that was enough travelling – hell no! I don’t think I could do 8 months again, but I’ve got more trips planned now than before I left. In no particular order:
• Do Thailand properly and do the slow boat down the Mekong into Laos from the Thai border.
• Do China then the Trans-Siberian railway to Mongolia and take it all the way to St. Petersburg.
• Helsinki to Prague taking in all the Baltic states I missed – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and properly explore Poland and Czech Republic
• Drive across Canada, west to east, but in the summer. No more snow or sub zero nights for me.
• And then there’s the entire land mass of South America, Africa and India. Too much ground, too little time.
Would I have done this trip any different? Not really, I would have switched Norway and Iceland round and not spent 4 days trapped in the West Fjords of Iceland. Would have spent longer in Turkey and less time in Greece, but it’s always 20-20 in hindsight. Oh yeah, and I wouldn’t have lost so much stuff. I though it would be funny to start this post with a list of all the things I lost, but I’d gotten to Cambodia and already the list was too depressing and would take too long to type. The Intrepid group or Nicola will understand. Let the fact that I never had trouble closing my bags after the 1st week say it all.
Thanks for all the feedback I’ve gotten from everyone who read my ramblings, it really surprised me the amount of people who have been reading and enjoying this. I really just started this as an alternative to group emails and the ubiquitous travel paper journal (which I would have lost), so to have so many people enjoying it is pretty cool. I have enjoyed writing them and I’m considering continuing it on in some shape or form, although the mundaneness of office working doesn’t present itself to weekly blogs, it would be a good way to vent work frustrations though and I know how much some of you liked it when I rant. We’ll see.
So that’s it for getjealous and statraveljournals for now. I’ll be taking a lot of the photos off the sta website in the new year so have a look see if you like that sort of thing. I’ll try to email all of you I met who are reading this some time soon, it feels a bit like a massive task at the moment. I’ll probably do it when I start work. Other than that, Happy New Year, I hope your next one is as good as the one I just had.
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