Jul 07

The couple of days O and I will spend in Malaysia on our way back from Australia is not a part of the trip we've thought about much, but the other day I was looking up info on visas and I ended up reading a guide to Kuala Lumpur. For whatever reason, I didn't realize how cheap Malaysia is. Sure, it's in SE Asia which is known for being cheap by Western standards, but maybe it seemed more modern to me and thus it would be more Western? But in this guide I was reading, it was saying that mid-range hotels, like O and I would normally look at staying in, cost between 70 and 150 ringgits (RM). So I checked out what, say, RM100 was in euros: about 21 euros. I didn't think that was right. I started digging around in the Rough Guide and online travel agencies, and I found that, yes, things are very cheap. On the D-Reizen site (a Dutch travel agency), you can get deals for a stay in a posh four or five-star hotel for 50-70 eur a night! I was shocked that it was so incredibly cheap. And the food is even cheaper! The Rough Guide listed Indian and Chinese restaurants that served whole meals for only a couple of euros, plus there are tons of street vendors serving up fried noodles and curries for near nothing, like 50 cents or so. It'll be a nice ending to the trip, living it up in a fancy hotel and gorging ourselves on Asian food.

As an introduction, I thought I'd explain the story behind the working holiday I'll be taking and what the plans are so far.

I've wanted to go to Australia since college, when I took a class on an Australian writer. I remember even telling a friend (when we were still in college) that I really wanted to go to England and Australia, but England was slightly more doable, so I made it there first and then ended up living in Europe, in Amsterdam. Living in Amsterdam has been wonderful, but I wasn't totally happy with it, and I kept wondering if there was a place where I'd feel more at home (or at least happier with the weather). Spain was an option for awhile, and then Vancouver, and eventually I started eyeing Australia because it seems so laid-back and everyone raves about it and I'm sure the weather beats Amsterdam's. Then, a couple of years ago, an Australian friend and former co-worker visited me from Melbourne and it made me think about Australia more. I started looking into visas for working in Australia and I had the idea of going there for a year to see what it was like. But then I found out that there were working holiday visas for 4 months for Americans. I thought that would be a much more reasonable amount of time to go and my plan for awhile was to go there for those few months as a test to see if I'd like living there.

The plan began in the summer of 2005. One of the stipulations of the visa is that you have to be between 18 and 30 years old, and at the time I was almost 28. I decided I would go to Australia in 2007, when I'd be turning 30 (so at the last possible moment) and I'd use the time until then to save up for the trip. And that's pretty much what I've done. But I'm not thinking about moving permanently to Australia anymore, mostly because it is just so far away. Even though I decided I wasn't going to be using the working holiday as a trial period anymore, I still definitely wanted to go because I wouldn't be able to do it after I turned 30, and I didn't want to miss the opportunity to have the experience of being able to live there for a few months.

This year has involved a lot of planning after just saving and talking about it for over a year. One of the first things I had to do was ask my boss if they would let me go on a leave of 5 months so I could return to my job afterwards. I feel very lucky because my company is allowing me the time off. But then I did basically tell them that if they didn't let me have this time off, I would quit my job to go because not going was not an option.

Besides that I've applied for the visa and booked flights and started to read about the many places I want to visit. I've only recently started actually looking into things regarding the work part of the trip, but that's ok, there's still quite a bit of time to sort that stuff out.

The plan at the moment is that I'll leave for Melbourne at the end of August and I plan to work there for 3 months. Onno will come over to join me at the end of November and we'll hang out in Melbourne for about a week. Then we fly to Auckland to begin a trip through New Zealand. We are there for a bit more than 2 weeks, which isn't long, but fortunately it's a smaller country than Australia. After we wind our way down to Dunedin, we fly back to Australia on Christmas Eve, to Sydney, and we spend Christmas in the Blue Mountains, just to the east of Sydney. After that we spend about a week in Sydney, including New Year's, which is meant to be absolutely amazing there. The next part of the trip is a bit more vague right now, but we want to drive through southeastern Australia and also spend some time in Tasmania. Eventually we'll end up in Adelaide and from there begin an Outback tour which ends in Alice Springs, in the very center of the country. We'll go to Uluru and Kings Canyon and go on hikes and sleep under the stars in the middle of the desert. After the tour and after spending some time in Alice Springs, we'll fly back to Melbourne and spend another couple of days there (including Australia Day) before flying out of the country. We don't go back to Amsterdam yet though, we'll spend a couple of days in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, since we fly back through there. We arrive back in Amsterdam on February 1, and I'm thinking now that arriving in the middle of winter was probably not the smartest of ideas, but it can't be changed now.

I'll probably write a bit more before I leave, if I have any interesting developments to share, otherwise it'll be news on how things are going in Australia.