Prologue

People start at the beginning right? That's what people do with travel blogs I guess hey.
Not everyone starts their travel diary halfway through though hey, but if you've ever lived in Australia, you may pick up one little annoying thing! The habit of adding a 'hey' at the end of a sentence to turn it into some kind of rhetorical question.
Anyways.
The prologue: before Australia...
I guess I should start in 2013 when I finally decided I was getting out of the UK and going to go to Australia. For the first parts of this blog, a lot of it is going to be distant memory or vague recollection. You're going to have to bear with me until I catch up with myself.

So. 2013: I was working for an american aerospace company called PCC who had put me through a graduate development programme for two years and actually given me a job in the real world. They took the fresh out of uni optimistic and naive me and moulded an engineer out of the clay... Partially. Turned out they hadn't ironed out the wanderlust fully. I ended up sitting next to a contract engineer from Canada who had worked around the world most of his life not staying in one place longer than 6 months at a time. He'd speak about all these different places every day and I'd consistently look at him with a blank expression because I'd never heard of wherever it was he was talking about. Needless to say this made him laugh but in a way he was almost outraged that I didn't know of some of them. I'll always remember how he claimed to know all of the world's countries and 90% of the capital cities, and most of the local airports and major rivers running through them. There is only one world that we all live on, and only around 250 different countries. Less than the amount of bones in the human body! Why wouldn't you know all of them?? Don't they teach you geography in school these days!?

I was surprised at how little I really knew. I had never really appreciated global geography until that point. Thankfully I found an app called brainscape, with the geography download I was suddenly able to get an influx of world knowledge. I became a little obsessed, memorising Switzerland's Bern to Burkina Faso's Ouagadougou, I found a new passion that was soon to inspire a wanderlust in me that the four walls desk job couldn't contain. I knew I wanted to get out of England. I also realised that the job I had was going in the wrong direction and I accepted that to get where I wanted to be, I'd need to join the air force or find a different path entirely. At some point in my life I intend to, but first I want to find out where I want to settle more long term. I actually just met a guy working in the Canadian air force who loved it and he's pretty much doing what I want to, in one of the countries I would be happy with (I always tend to get on with Canadians, they're my kind of people). Before I get too sidetracked; I ended up getting head hunted by a different company in Nottingham, not far from where I was working originally so I wouldn't have to move apartments. Bonus. My bachelor pad in Nottingham was amazing, and I had the best housemates! That's another blog post in itself though. So anyways, this company, ended up giving me an annual pay rise and an incentive which this was perfect for me until I was ready for Australia! I already had itchy feet to go but needed the finances to get there and qualify for the visa acceptance, so I took the job. It ended up being pretty sweet, the people there were actually really cool and I learnt a lot about how other businesses could be run (this company culture was a lot more communal and cooperative, with an infrastructure to back it up. I got flown to Germany for a few projects and also to Philadelphia in the states via New York! In NY I managed to get drunk with my boss and got a tattoo, a little Apple in the Big Apple, on my butt. I then proceeded to pay for it.... with my company credit card. Needless to say this was accidental, because it looked identical to my HSBC credit card but it required a tonne of explaining when it came to expense forms. At that time as well, I found out the salary I was getting was comparable to the guys that had been working there as hard if not harder than I was for 20 plus years. Asking for a pay rise was out of the question, and the bright future of living behind a desk was losing its appeal. I knew the job wasn't right for me and my heart wasn't in it, and when my boss started speaking about commitment, admitting he was a 70% work 30% home life and would expect similar from me I knew I was far closer to 50% 50%. I wanted to go out and play guitar in the evenings, I hated getting into work in the morning after staying out at open mic nights in Notts till late.

6 months later I parted ways with that job and booked a flight to Brisbane, Australia early in 2014.Read more