(If you're looking for our current blog, post Big Adventure, it's here.)
The book of this blog is available here.
Well, it's all over.
We arrived in Heathrow on Tuesday morning to be met by my mum and sister. It was odd to be home, largely, I suppose, due to our tiredness.
What we did right
We made lots of good decisions during our travels. We've done a lot of "assessing" of the Big Adventure lately. Overall, we conclude, a big success. Firstly, Anne and I both like travelling so we enjoyed seeing Australia and New Zealand and finding out all the little cultural difference. Quite apart from the travelling, however, it's been a good year to take stock and to slow down a bit.
We thought that we'd be old compared to most of the travellers, and were surprised to see that many many travellers were just like us - couples in their late twenties who had worked for several years and had decided to have a break. In Christchurch we read an article in the paper about "Flashpackers", travellers who had more funds than previously when more people did it straight from school or uni, wore trendy clothes, and spent more cash on trips and entertainment. This article could have been written about us. Except for the bit about trendy clothes.
During our last few months in the UK before we left, I looked into options for taking music away. An iPod would have been best (it was all Anne could do to stop me getting one in San Fran last week!) but I couldn't afford that. What I finally decided on, a CD player that plays MP3 CDs, turned out to do the job without problems. Our friend Tony even sent out some CDs with new music on to keep us hip and trendy.
Hiring cars in New Zealand was a good call. It was a little anti-social, but it gave us a lot of freedom, and meant we could stock up on food from supermarkets and eat really well!
What we did wrong
Firstly, we possibly went for a bit too long. Ten months might have been a little better.
We missed out some places we'd like to have seen. Crappy bus schedules on the West Coast of Australia meant we skipped some of the more interesting places there, and we were a bit sad not to go to Tasmania. In retrospect, I can't see that Tassie would have compared favourably to the South Island of New Zealand (our favourite place overall). Since we were looking for double rooms, and are by our natures nervous people, we tended to book rooms ahead. This meant that we weren't that flexible on the day. Not that there were many places we'd have liked to stay longer, but it meant that we couldn't do a trip to Kakadu National Park form Darwin, and we missed a few other sights.
All that said, we wouldn't want to exhaust the possibilities of a country. We left Australia having seen most of it, but with some ideas of what we could do if we go back.
Next time
If (when) we travel again we've said that two to three months away would be ideal, but I'm glad we did it for longer than that this time. A year in hostels has been tiring, even though we had private double rooms (and lots of ensuites - especially in the last few months) and only spent one night in a dorm (and two sleeping in a communal cabin on a boat). By travelling for a shorter period we could do it in a little more style (still in hostels probably, but eating out more and with more luxuries).
I'd take a laptop too. This blog has been good to keep, but we were often limited in time and had to go to an internet cafe and rush through a blog, realising once our time was up that we'd not said lots that we wanted to. The laptop would have a DVD player - I looked longingly at a guy on the plane from San Francisco who had a large-screen laptop and was watching 24 Hour Party People whilst I was watching Tomb Raider.
Also, of course, an iPod.
Many thanks
Thanks to all our regular and occasional readers. We've had lots of emails from people about the blog, and have greatly enjoyed keeping this journal. It's been expensive in internet cafe time, but well worth it for both the keeping-in-touch element, and for the permanent record of an amazing year. Occasionally it's been a chore ("Oh dear, we've not done a blog for ages"). I wish I'd never started doing movie reviews - I did the first few as a joke, but then my mildly obsessive-compulsive nature compelled me to continue. Obsessively.
The beginning
Having made the decision to continue to rent out our flat in Ealing and look for work in Cambridge, we have come home to no home and no jobs. Our old life simply isn't here anymore. It's very odd. It's good in lots of ways - if we'd come back to our old flat and our old jobs it might have felt like we'd never gone before too long. A sad thing about coming back is that we had to go to a funeral the day after we returned. It was good to see friends there, but the circumstances were unhappy. We were grateful to be home for it though rather than be travelling.
Has the year changed us much? Well, we're travelling to Manchester on a National Express coach on Sunday!
(Don't worry - we're not turning pikey: there are train problems so the coach was the better option.)
The next year is more uncertain than the last one for us, so begins the next Big Adventure...