Since you've been gone

Well, well, well…where to begin? The travel winds have swirled yet again and this time I’ve ridden the gales back to the “old world,” back in time so to speak where it’s only a +6 hour time difference between me and majority of my modest readership. Greetings from Amsterdam! Almost six months to the day from when I first touched ground in Australia, I hopped on a jet plane and made a long trek from Perth to Paris with one night layovers each in Sydney and Seoul. I’ll get to Amsterdam in a bit because, as you can imagine, it’s a roller coaster of a place in its own right.

Departure day from Australia closed a very big chapter in the travel book that has been written over the past, say, 2-3 years. A nearly 6 month stint in Oz, made it my longest consecutive stay in any foreign country where I have ever lived. Through my one-on-one conversations with anyone reading this, it’s no secret that I wasn’t in love with Australia – Perth in particular. For me, both Australia’s virtue and vice was its similarity to the US. Same language of course which admittedly served as a guilty pleasure never having to preface a conversation with some version of “sorry, I don’t speak xxx;” same ease and accessibility of things because of efficient infrastructure (as opposed to Asia let’s say); and the same high quality of life which in itself provided less of a “wow factor” during my time there. All of the similarities perhaps explain why my entries were so few and far between in Australia – not so many culturally new things to write about I guess. The comfort and ease in which I was able to operate in Australia was certainly the virtue. But a big perk of my job is the chance to live in the obscure, different places. So Australia failed to live up to that respect.

However, professionally, I am very pleased with how the Oz experience turned out. I found the report that we were working on – the country’s upstream petroleum industry – super interesting. And as difficult as it was at times to understand, I really enjoyed riding the learning curve of the energy sector which included up close and personal conversations with industry folks such as the CEOs of Shell and INPEX in Australia, and the governor of Western Australia – Australia’s predominant energy state. Energy is definitely an industry that I am keen on getting more into in the future.

This has never been a blog about work, so I will end the work talk here. But it’s all to say that despite the personal boredom I often felt living in the world’s most isolated city, Perth and Australia as a whole had their fair share of great experiences. With the luxury of six months behind my back, I can now safely say that getting lost in the woods outside of Sydney (subject of a previous blog post) was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. I mean, shouting “help” into the barren wilderness so as to avoid sleeping on the dirt amongst God knows what types of snakes and spiders is quite the rush. I hit the open road for a fruitful trek up the Western Australian coast treating myself to stunning landscapes and scenery. I met some great people along the way, both local Aussies and expats whose travel paths I crossed. And I even conquered the tyrannies of distance for one week by taking a vacation to the Philippines and spending quality time with dear friends and family.

Australia is a tough place to “do” in six months, while working. There’s just so much to see and do. You can spend an entire year in the country enjoying all that it has to offer. At an initial glance it might look ludicrous that I never made it to the Great Barrier Reef or didn’t trek through the deserts in the central heartlands. Let’s just say that they’re high on my list of things to do when I do make it back to Oz and have more free time on my agenda for just the travel aspect. My job is interesting in that I am in an ambiguous state between “traveling” and “living” abroad. Too long in one set place to be just traveling, too short to be able to say I am living, this tension created a love-hate relationship between me and Australia. I loved having so many outdoor and adventurous trips to think of, but hated ultimately being dragged back to the infeasibility of squeezing cross country trips into just one weekend while budgeting $5 half gallons of milk and $2 per pound of apples into my weekly expenses. Australia has no shortage of fun and exciting things to do hence why I fully plan on dedicating one long strictly travel related trip to it sometime in the future. Until then, I leave Oz where it is, full of positive memories, and look forward to the new opportunities that await in the Netherlands.