Escapes and escapism

I do hate when blogs I follow trail off with no further clues on what's going on in a blogger's life, so while I'm not really feeling the blogging right now, it does seem only fair to give a bit of an update. Plus I've been doing some fun stuff! In May this year I quit my job to head off on a three month overseas adventure, and then unexpectedly (but happily) found myself wrapping up not just my job but also my relationship of more than five years and our shared household. Which while sad, suddenly meant that I was free to extend the adventure. I headed off to Canada with two of my closest friends, Matt and Mark, to drive 3000 kilometres in an unreliable $400 van, and then spent 16 days canoeing the Yukon River.

It was an incredible journey; we were on the river just as spring was arriving and each day would bring fresh, hyper-colour green tree growth and more sunshine as we made our way from Whitehorse to Dawson City. We were pretty sick of canoeing by the end of the trip, but to have such an experience with good friends was unforgettable.

Once that section of the trip was over Mark headed home, while Matt and I continued on for two months of roadtripping through northwestern USA. I don't think I've had a grin plastered on my face for so many days straight in my life. We stopped each night in small towns and state or national parks, did a mammoth amount of thrift store shopping, drank a lot of coffee and ate a lot of diner breakfasts, listened to a lot of music, talked a great deal, and played countless games of backgammon in campsites.

After Matt left I stayed on in Canmore, Alberta, to see whether living in a mountain town might be fun for awhile. And it is, but the pull of home is very strong as well. It's incredible to look up at the mountains and get out and enjoy them with wonderful new friends, but I miss friends and family from home, and big city life, and there are many more jobs that excite me in Melbourne. So now I'm at a crossroads, with a foot in each camp and a new decision every six hours about what I'm doing next. It's hard to make a choice when you're choosing between awesome and awesome, and to figure out whether you're opting out of making serious decisions or making the most of the opportunities you have.

Some updating to do

Due to popular demand (Hi Mum) I'm not going to let this blog just fade away entirely as it was threatening to do.

The past month has been an absolutely crazy month of weddings, I've spent my weekends in Newcastle, South Africa (that was work rather than wedding),the Huon Valley of Tasmania and Ballarat.

It's been wonderful to watch friends and family make such an incredible commitment to each other, each wedding has been amazing for its own reason. The Newcastle wedding had the most heartfelt, beautiful vows I can possibly imagine, the Tasmanian wedding was such a celebration of the entire lifestyle the couple have embraced together, and the Ballarat wedding was a completely accurate reflection of the couple's sense of humour - they had a giant novelty wedding certificate and their vows were hilarious.


So look for some updates starting now on our chooks, vegie garden and more.

These photos are from the Stellenbosch Botanical Gardens in Cape Town. I spent three hours there on the day when I was leaving South Africa and I took a huge number of photos. And then forced Tom and my parents to sit through a slideshow of every shot when I got home - lucky them!

When I'm not living my life...

...I'm pretending to live one of these ones:

My Scandinavian Retreat - which has beautiful photos of all things Scandinavian cabin-ish, I think my favourite posts are the one where you get to see their deck cut perfectly to fit the surrounding rocks, and the one where you get a sense of how beautiful the view from their place is, even the one right from their bed!

bigBANG studio - which just makes me want to move to the desert and meet amazing people, attend parties in off-the-grid houses, get diggity-down desert style, and live in beautiful scenery. And Lily's moving to India later this year - I'm looking forward to it!

I think one of my favourite things about blogs is that you can have such an insight into someone else's life, and you can find someone, somewhere doing something you'd love to do. These blogs were each recommendations from two of my favourite other blogs, which I also wish I were living in!

The first was a recommendation from Pia Jane Bijkerk, an Australian living on a houseboat in Amsterdam, the second came from Kate of for me, for you, of New York.

Welkam to the Solomon Islands

Sorry folks, I didn't mean to drop off for a week, but was out contact with the world for a week, thanks to a last-minute opportunity to go to the Solomon Islands on a media famil thanks to the Solomon Islands Visitors' Bureau. I have just had such an amazing, relaxing, exciting week checking out Honiara and some of the small islands nearby.
The islands felt so welcoming, it was a real novelty to travel somewhere and feel so safe and unhassled. Which is a little ironic, considering they had a coup a few years ago and Australian RAMSI peacekeeping forces are still in the area, although that's probably partly to thank for the mood, but mostly it was just that the locals were friendly and everyone would say hello to you as you walked through the town or around a small village.
It reminded me a little of Ecuador, one of my favourite countries to travel in, as they both share that friendliness, but also because there was so much to see and you don't have to cover great distances to see something entirely different. They also have both managed to avoid being overrun with tourists, instead it feels much more like the locals are still in control and gaining some benefits from tourism without having it change their way of life. Like any country it has its problems, mainly race tensions, but it was an incredible place to visit. I've never been to any Pacific islands before, so it was also a novel to travel such a short distance but be somewhere so different from home.

The bustling market in Honiara. Everything is laid out very neatly because of council rules, but it's quite stunning visually to see such artistically arranged bright fruits, cloths, seafood and more. (Apologies for a not great quality photo, I don't have as many of people as I'd like, so I need to hold the decent ones I have back for the story in the mag.)



A lei to welcome us to Maravagi Resort, about two hours boat ride from the capital, Honiara.



The beach hut we stayed in for a couple of nights at Maravagi. You could snorkel just a couple of metres off shore and be swimming with rainbow, angel, and other tropical fish over coral.



The view back to our little hut and beach.



Stunning bright foliage. The islands were so lush and green - it's always such a treat to see such a verdant place after years of drought in Australia.



And what would a trip to a tropical island be without sipping from a coconut on the beach.



All up, I felt so lucky to have this opportunity, even if now I'm coming down with a thump to the real world of the end of semester essays being due!

While I was gone...

I went on another long drive. Not as bad a long drive as the one I wrote about below, but a drive from Melbourne to Sydney via Mt Buller for a spot of mountain biking.
In Sydney there was plenty of hanging out with Tom's relatives and friends (he's from there), lots of reading, sometimes in lovely spots like Balmoral beach, below (by the way, like the foot I'm growing out of my nose?)


some posing with landmarks


the odd bit of walking (Blue Mountains, below)



and a train ride up to Newcastle.
Then, thank goodness, no more driving or training, a flight home.
Home sweet home, where you could be forgiven for thinking I had chosen a handmade rug in the sophisticated shade of 'dirty clothes', where aphids and caterpillars took advantage of my absence to ravage the cabbages, something else damaged the flowers in the backyard, and where I now have to actually look at a calendar and realise there are some deadlines creeping closer than might be comfortable.

A Long Drive

I decided to play along with the Meet Me At Mike's Words and Pictures after reading a very evocative entry on Megan's blog. This week's theme is A Long Drive. My mind immediately turned to some of the horrendously long bus rides I've taken as a traveller; this was one of them that happened last year. (It should be noted, the country wasn't as bad as this welcoming drive might have indicated.)

It was already four in the afternoon, and we had no idea where we were going to sleep that night. We'd been in a different town every night for the past week, and had just got off yet another all-day stint on a bus. The border crossing had been horrible as we were heckled, jostled and scammed at every turn. Taxi drivers, people trying to guide us through the process, market stall holders, small children, they all crowded in at us, each trying to negotiate something. As we started to waver, and considered accepting the taxi driver's ridiculously high price, a security guard at the bank caught my eye and gave a barely noticeable shake of his head. It was the jolt I needed, and we fought our way through the crowd until we got to the police station to ask directions.

The taxi driver we finally settled on whisked us off to the official border entry point further along the road, and then took us to the next town, from where we could catch the bus to Lima. He bargained with us the entire time, and even as we paid him more than we'd agreed on, he fixed us with puppydog eyes. As soon as he'd left we bought food, pointing to each item without knowing the price. Tom tried to bargain, naming a price that seemed cheap to us. The storeholder looked at us oddly, and named a sum that was half of what we had offered. We immediately realised how much we'd given our taxi driver in real terms.

We had made it just in time to catch the last overnight bus, and half an hour later we were cooped back up and on the move again. Dusk fell, and the barren landscape became just potholes and small towns that rushed by in the headlights. As a Spanish film started on the television screens the stewardess came around with a small meal. The night wore on, and I'd pulled an eye mask on to try and sleep.

Half an hour later I still couldn't sleep. 'Tom, I don't think I feel very well' I whispered, prodding my half-asleep boyfriend and getting a grunt in return. I writhed in my chair, struggling to overcome rising nausea that worsened with every bump in the road. When I felt the bus slow I leapt from my seat and dashed down the stairs to the door, pushing past the stewardess and policeman checking the bus's papers and only just missing his shoes as I vomited into the dust. They looked down at me as I vomited again, before turning away to finish their paper check. 'Time to go!' the stewardess said chirply as I leaned my head on my knees, crouching barefoot on the roadside.

Soon after dawn broke it became obvious that this was going to be a proper bout of food poisoning. I headed down to the toilet, only to discover a sign reading 'Solo urinario'. I asked the stewardess if I could go to the toilet in the next town. Despite much overuse on my part of the word 'emergencia', we passed through one small town, then another, then another as I grew more and more uncomfortable. Finally I couldn't wait anymore, and used the bus toilet. Half an hour later the bus stopped in the middle of nowhere. Cries of 'Where's the gringa?' rose up from downstairs. I headed down to see what was going on. 'Okay, here you go' the stewardess said, gesturing to the open door. Outside there was nothing. We were in a desert with not a single shrub to squat behind in sight. 'Where's the toilet?' I asked the driver. 'This is Peru!' he replied, 'The whole country's a toilet!'

By the time we reached Lima that evening I became glad of the design of bus bathrooms: I was able to vomit into the sink without leaving the toilet. The bus had only stopped three times in 24 hours - the two paper checks and five minutes at a service station. We finally reached a hostel in Lima and I crawled into bed feeling weak and exhausted. Half an hour later I pulled back the sheets, only to find myself covered in bedbug bites. Welcome to Peru.