I’ve mentioned my career break trip on this blog quite a few times, but I haven’t really said much about it. I guess it’s time to do something about that.
Why
Sometimes around mid 2007 me and my then boyfriend (and now husband) decided it was time for us to move back to Europe. After living in Australia for a few years we wanted to try something new and be a bit closer to our families. And since in order to do that we were going to quit our jobs and sell all our stuff, we thought we might as well travel. We always wanted to do it, but there never seem to be the right time. This opportunity was perfect and we were going to use it as well as we could.
When
19 December 2008 was our last day at work. I remember this day very clearly, as it was one of the happiest moments of my life. I knew very special chapter of my life was about to start. We left Australia a week later. What was originally suppose to be a tree-month trip ended up lasting six time longer.
The trip officially ended on the 2nd of September 2010.
Where
There were three phases to this trip. We started with a semi-overland trip from Australia to Poland that took us about 8 months to complete. I call this phase semi-overland, because we did take a few flights. New Zealand was the first country we visited and the Philippines followed. From there we traveled pretty much only overland until we reached Poland – we went to Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Mongolia, Russia and Ukraine. We chilled out in Poland for about 5 weeks, visiting family and friends.
The second phase of out trip – South America – was suppose to be our cheap way of learning Spanish. We wanted to live in Spain and it made sense to work on our language skills first. Doing it in Spain was way too expensive. So we went to Ecuador, where we attended the language school and than we traveled through Galapagos, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Easter Island for about six months.
At that point we were suppose to return to the ‘normal’ life. But we just couldn’t do it. Traveling bug was so well developed at that stage, that we couldn’t just ignore it. Instead, we went back to Poland, spent another few awesome weeks with families and friends, and left for Nepal and India for tree months of adventure.
How
It was a typical backpacking, low-cost adventure. We stayed in cheap places, ate where locals did, used public transport, but we never tried to save money on things we really wanted to do (like going to Galapagos or Easter Island). We did not work on the road. We decided we hadn’t left one job to get another, but to travel and travel only.
What’s next
Somehow our move from Australia to Europe ended up being a move from Australia to… Australia. The dream of living in Spain had to be abandoned, as the global economic crisis affected Spanish economy really badly. There was no point going to a country with 20% unemployment rate. For similar reasons we didn’t want to live in Poland either. So the decision was made to give Australia another shot.
So here we are in Sydney, working full time jobs again, but we are very different people now. We know those full time jobs are just a phase. We want to travel. We want to live in Argentina, Thailand, Indonesia and Mexico for a bit. We want to keep discovering the world. We have a few ideas about how we could achieve that. And we are working on making them the reality. It will take some time, but I’m sure we will eventually live our dream lives :)
