Leaving Australia

It feels strange to be leaving a place that for so long was just a vague idea based loosely somewhere in the future, long before it took form as a couple of plane tickets with hundreds of calendar boxes to cross off to the end of May. In January we choose not to book return flights because we weren't sure how we'd feel over here, whether we'd want to stay out here for 3, 6 months, a year even. But now feels like the right time to start travelling back home. I've booked my plane tickets and I'll be leaving Sydney on Friday 24^th at 11am - bound for Beijing. After a few days in Beijing where I'll get to explore the Great Wall and the Forbidden City among other things I'm catching the sleeper train that'll take me over a 3000km triangle of northern China, west to Xian, home of the Terracotta Warriors, then south west to Shanghai before returning north to Beijing to catch a flight to the UK on the 5^th November. I am flying Qantas so have your fingers crossed for me. Lee intends to leave Sydney 4 weeks from now with a 2-week stopover in New Zealand where he's planning to explore the south island in a camper van – very cool.

There were lots of things we wanted to do on this trip, some of them we did like scuba diving over the Great Barrier Reef, learning to surf, a beach crawl up to Cairns, and of course paying homage to the BIG PRAWN!! Other's we didn't do like Uluru, Alice Springs, and Melbourne. We're planning to come back next year on a holiday visa to see these but for now I had to make a choice between Uluru and China, though for me this wasn't a difficult decision to make. Of course we'd have been able to afford to do it all if we hadn’t lost $4000 on the car! But to do it all now would mean returning to my job at the State Government and working in Sydney until January and in many ways that would be excellent, our Aussie friends here are really great people who we'll miss a lot, and a lifestyle centred round barbecues, surfing, and beach walks can’t be bad, and for a long time in Sydney we forgot that we were just travelling, but at some point on our trip up to Cairns we remembered that we have lives back home albeit on pause and no matter how great things are over here there are a lot of things missing like our friends back home, family, our own beds. We're getting quite travel weary and living out of a backpack for the past 5-months is starting to take its toll (although the ranch party we attended over the weekend helped to alleviate much of our stress – tennis, swimming pools and hot tubs in the sun have a strange way of doing that).

Sydney seems to be inside something of a cyclone at the moment so I'm probably leaving at a good time. It's been an excellent adventure and I'm looking forward to China as well as returning home in November.

You stay classy England.

See you all soon!!