My first time travelling, but not the last

I've been travelling around Southeast Asia for 7 months. Really. 7 months!

I recently returned home to Australia and am now capable of fully admitting that I failed spectacularly in my goal to update this blog regularly while I was on the road. I am sorry. I have always been sorry about this. Usually my problem is I have too many things to say, and in my painful, circular attempts to gift you the blessing of conciseness and precision, I give up, red-faced and puffing, mashing my face into the keyboard, and ultimately not saying anything at all. But let's face it, I also made a commitment to choose life whenever it was a choice between living and writing about living. So in that, I won.

Still, I do want to share with you my thoughts, hopes and feelings. All of which have intensified in importance and meaning in my past 7 months away. So thank you for your patience as I try, yet again, to blog.

Reflecting on this past year, I have to say, I made it! Who knew I'd last this long? From May 17th to Dec 11th, I visited Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. It's a magnificent Google map waiting to happen.

Far from sating my travel urge (I am trying to avoid use of the word "wanderlust" here) by living out of a 60L pack for almost a year , I have merely whetted my appetite to see more places, meet more people, and taste more food. And while I still wonder about how and when my completed university degrees and a successful career will collide in a bankable fashion, I worry about it less than I did before I left Sydney with a ticket to Saigon in my hands. Because I can now, completely and wholeheartedly, own the truth that my true interest lies in travel, and that I'd like to make it priority for at least the next 5 years. If a career happens along the way, whoopee. But come on, choices, people! We can't have everything... although we try. So we have to think about what matters to us most, right now.

(More on this later.)

For now, after realising I have actually invested over 11 months out of the past 24 in travel, I think it a reasonable outcome that at some point, while adjusting to my return to a developed first-world country, drinking tea made from delicious diarrhea-free tap water, I thought back about the first time I truly "travelled" - because I consider myself a late bloomer to the jet-setting, backpacking life. The answer would seem obvious - it was recent, right?

In fact, the result was surprising.

My first travel experience

I remember the first time I travelled outside of my hometown alone, and I mean "travel" in a way that I'd consider more than simply going from A to B. It made an impression.

I was 19. I'd gotten a summer job with a minerals exploration company. I was very excited because I was one of the earliest in my university cohort to find industry-related work experience. Almost everyone else in the company was an experienced older Caucasian male geologist, with greying hair and thick Australian accents.

View from the train window.

Every weekend for 3 months I left the sleepy outer-city suburbs where I grew up, and took a 4 hour train journey to a place further away from the ocean than I'd ever been before. There I spent my days traipsing about the rugged Aussie countryside in steel-capped boots, digging around in soil and rocks, to the operatic tune of heavy machinery. It was a culture shock for me, and a great learning experience.

One morning when I woke up early (not by choice, come on, I was 19) and crawled out of my little metal donga to get ready for work, I went outside before I met my workmates and took a moment to take in the pre-dawn.

Our work camp, consisting of nothing more than a few "dongas" or mobile tin buildings.

The first light of dawn.

An outback sunrise.

This was a new site we were investigating just for a week, and it was my first true-blue taste of The Outback. We were 600 km inland. The ground was as red as rust. The horizon was a dead flat thin black line rising to ever lightening heights into a diluted navy sky still dotted with a few exhausted stars. It was as close to the desert as I've ever been; cold, quiet, and empty. I was totally alone. Yet I remember thinking to myself, "I don't feel lonely. I feel peaceful."

Later that day, the heavens opened up and flooded the dusty, parched earth with torrential rain that lasted barely an hour. It was beautiful. My workmates and I waited for the mud to drain away and took photos of a giant mushroom that exploded out of the ground.

I love a sunburnt country. My country.

Sudden shroom!

This experience was the first time I travelled. The disappointing thing is, I didn't realise it until now, simply because the way I got there was through work. I saw it as only work. Which means I lost years of appreciation for what I am capable of. It took me so long to understand that there are alternative ways to make my dreams happen.

Work. Study. Family. The ultimate triad of life priorities, and they are good ones indeed. But when you've got other interests like travel, and you're not told how you can combine them with the other things on your list, you can feel like you've spent forever waiting to pursue that dream.

All I can say is, don't wait. Find a way. It will be worth it. You will surprise yourself.

~ ~ ~

Hope you enjoyed my return post and my photos! I dug through 6 years of archives and countless feels to find them.

If you like what I write (and forgive me my lack of discipline) please share!

Perhaps you could even

Finally, and most importantly, I hope you have all had a very MERRY CHRISTMAS!

NaNoWriMo

My history as a writer has been a bit half-hearted. One of the earliest dreams I had as a kid was to publish a novel, and as far as I can tell, the fantasy hasn't lost its appeal, even though my creative writing has bled dry like a creek in the desert over the last few years.

I entered the National Novel Writing Month challenge last year to poke the muses, but since it was mostly a distraction from my far more difficult and terrifying thesis, I didn't get very far.

The NaNoWriMo challenge is to write 50,000 words in the month of November. I didn't get there this year either, but I got much more out of the experience than merely words. After all, who is a writer that doesn't write?

My achievement graph. Words, words, words.

For people who have never written but want to, NaNo is a great source of inspiration. For people who have written before, NaNo offers focus and motivation, support and encouragement, and a chance to practice. Amateurs and pros the world over get something out of it it, because even published authors fall into the trap of letting "normal life" get in the way, or of feeling insecure.

Writing is a fairly solitary endeavour, but with NaNo comes heaps of online support and local events. I met some fellow writers in my area and discovered the community is a lot bigger and friendlier than I realised.

I've loved the confidence I've gotten from NaNo, and how it's helped me develop my story. It's a strange experience, getting to know characters I should supposedly know everything about because I invented them. It really is like meeting people in real life, slowly building their trust, hearing about their pasts, becoming familiar with their personalities and quirks.

To those who say "But you can't write a novel in a month!", of course they're probably right. Novels aren't just about word limits. You need to plan, edit, organise, and that takes a lot longer than 30 days to do. But you can write a first draft, which gets you one step closer to a novel, and hopefully have lots of fun along the way too!

NaNo isn't for everyone, but for me, it's helped me beat away the travel withdrawal blues, and I've learned a lot about the process, about how I can be a better writer. So 50,000 words or not, I feel like a winner.  

 

This week I smiled because

A lot of good reasons to smile this week!

Many of them have been writing-related. I decided to give the annual NaNoWriMo challenge another try this year, even though I was still partying it up in Europe when the clocks ticked over into November 1st. I'm very proud of what I've done, even though I didn't "win" for various reasons. Because you know what? Without NaNo, I wouldn't have written as much as I did! Here I talk a little bit more about what NaNo means to me and my experience with it this month.

Monday: Over 3k words.

Tuesday: Over 5k words. (Wow!)

Wednesday: Nearly 4k words.

Thursday: Over 3k words. Also, this was somehow my most focused writing day in ages. Later on, I went to a super cool hip hop bar with my beloved F to watch a rap battle. I saw some amazing talent and met some friendly strangers. Then on the drive home, my friend's friend, a kind and seriously skilled MC, blasted the beats in the car and did some improv rap out the window. Great memories! Oh, and I stuffed my face with this heart-stopping creation:

If you haven't been to Mr Crackles on Oxford street, then you must. Pork belly roll with crispy crackling. Drool... 

Hustle and Flow on Regent street. Fantastic little joint with great art and a rather interesting shot challenge.

Friday: I dropped the writing ball a little today. But I went to an amazing techno gig in the evening with a simply brilliant DJ out of Detroit, Mike Huckaby. I literally danced till dawn. It wasn't easy to show up on the d'floor alone, but some lovely fellow boogie-woogiers gave me kudos for my bravery.

Spinning and shuffling at the Burdekin Hotel on Oxford street.

Saturday: I welcomed home my sister who I haven't seen in ages! I also caught up with some friends I hadn't seen in months, who greeted me with cheers. Way to feel loved! A day of reunions.

Sunday: It’s a lovely day. Hot, bone-dry, and typically Australian. The sky is darkening to a deep ominous blue, the wind is picking up in that unsettled way just before a storm breaks, and though there isn't a breath of moisture in the air, there is loud, rumbling thunder overhead, and it's getting louder and closer every minute. It won't be long before lightning is splitting the sky and the rain is bucketing down. Very moody. Very beautiful.