...getting away from it all...

So off I went on my travels - first destination, Fiji, but need to stop and lose my bags in LA on the way to make the journey complete!… what a div… I had to transfer in LA, and I managed to pick up someone else’s bag before going through customs (not as stupid as it sounds! This bag was exactly the same as mine, except the sticker was in a slightly different place and the padlock was different!). I surprisingly didn’t panic much actually, but they wouldn’t let me go back once I’d been through customs so I just had to wait. They reckoned it would be 30 minutes and my transferring flight was leaving in 15... I was ok though (don’t know how but I was!) and I just leant against a wall thinking, ‘I wonder what I’ll have to do if I lose my bag and my flight leaves without me?’ I was quite expecting to have to stay in LA over night actually, but wouldn’t you know it, literally 2 minutes after I realised I’d lost my bag and there was nothing I could do, a girl of similar age to me walked through customs carrying my bag. We politely swapped over and went on our way. I was stared at as I got on the plane with an ‘I was the hold-up’ sticker on my forehead (or might as well have had!) which was so embarrassing!

Fiji was very different from what I’m used to, and I don’t think I slept a wink for the first 3 days due to a ‘what on earth am I doing here’ feeling. The Fijian people are mega friendly and the many islands are absolutely beautiful. Bright turquoise waters and fine golden sand! I still hadn’t really learnt to relax the whole time I was in Fiji though, but I do remember a time when I climbed to the top of a steep hill and sang Stevie Wonder at the top of my lungs to this dog that had decided to follow me, feeling like I was on top of the world.

I spent a lot of time on my own during my travels actually as I wasn’t really after making a whole bunch of new friends, or even particularly having outrageous fun - it was more about learning for me and just having some thinking time to gain perspective for my life. I did meet some great people, but none of whom I’ve kept contact with.

I spent two weeks in Fiji, and after that, I went to New Zealand for 2 months. New Zealand is absolutely stunning, and I pretty much did a tour of the whole country, starting with the North Island where I did a sky dive and walked around a mass of steaming geysers amongst other muchly exciting things.

I then took a train from Aukland to Wellington which pretty much took a whole day but was really beautiful and worth it and I met a lovely girl from Malasia who had a fascinating story to tell while I sat and listened and let the world go by!

I was so fortunate with the weather whilst I was travelling - I mean the day I did the sky-dive was a stunner, and it just seemed to be right for whatever I was doing. When I was on the South Island, I did something called a heli-hike in Franz Josef. This is where you go up an icy mountain in a helicopter to the top and then hike around for a couple of hours checking out the ice caves and the view. The day before I initially planned to do it though, I went on a brewery tour and got absolutely wasted and had to nurse a cracking hangover the next day… the day that the heli-hike was cancelled due to bad weather, no less! The next day the sun was shining bright and the weather was perfect. I remember hearing other people’s stories of how they’d had to miss doing things because the weather had let them down, but I remember writing in my travel journal that ‘the sun seemed to be following me around’.

My travels taught me so much about myself and about the world and about other people. I’d been refined to a ‘simply-Worthing-view’ for so many years and now I was experiencing more of a world view! I remember thinking about the possibility of a god actually when I was on a coach in New Zealand and there was beautiful scenery all around me and a lamb with a bird on it’s back. I just thought, ‘wow, someone must have put this here for me to see!’

After New Zealand I hit Australia which I didn’t make much of actually. It was way too hot for me, and I was supposed to be getting a job and spending 9 months in the place. All I was doing was sweating and feeling exhausted with a constant heat headache. After a few days in the red light district of Sydney, I’d got a pretty negative view of the Aussies (probably not a very accurate one, but none the less I wasn’t enjoying myself)

I stayed with a friend of a friend in Melbourne for about a week after coming from Sydney, but about 3 days before the Christmas of 2004, I decided I wanted to quit my travels and come home. I was supposed to go to Thailand but I’m pretty glad I didn’t coz it was the Tsunami that year and it would’ve been quite likely that I could’ve died! So I tried to book a flight to get me home for Christmas, but there was nothing until Boxing day. When I went to get my tickets sorted though, there’d been a cancellation and I got a flight that landed at Heathrow at 5:30 Christmas day morning… WHAT A BONUS! There was a God!

Worthing looked so different after my time away and I really began to appreciate stuff more. It was like my eyes had been opened and I could at last appreciate what I had.. A great family, a secure home, good friends, the beach… simple things, but none the less, amazing!