Step One - The Adventure

---

Today – 9th November 2010 – marks the beginning of our one year long journey! Sitting on a Cathay Pacific flight, we’ve said our goodbyes and are facing a 22 hour flight on which Poonam will watch six movies back to back and I gracefully do three with some sleep as well!

The last couple weeks and days before we left, flew by like a Formula 1 race! So much so that we didn’t have the opportunity to tick of everything on the to-do list including seeing and speaking to everyone we wanted to. However, we did have a send off that is going to stay in our memories for longer than the next twelve months. Thank you to everyone that was able to make it to our leaving drinks and made it an excellent night for us. 

This adventure – like so many things in life – started as a small seed of inspiration. It began many years ago when I had the idea of wanting to travel to Nepal to teach English as a second language. Unfortunately, that never happened and with the thought that married life would put a stop to the Aussie dream, I let the seed become buried. It wasn’t until an off the cuff conversation with Poonam about the idea of living abroad for a year came up that she quickly watered the buried seed. Here we are today flying to Australian soil!

So many people have asked why we are doing this and whether we’re actually thinking of immigrating. First of all, NO! We have no intentions of wanting to live out here for longer than twelve months. The reason we have embarked on this year in Australia is to have an experience of life! We chose Australia for a whole host of reasons – you name it and it is likely to be on our list. We’re still young and want to experience life. It is a huge risk giving up our day jobs and going into the unknown but unless we leave the comfort of our shores we won’t find new lands. (I’m sure you’re tired of hearing that line from me now!) In essence unless we take risks we may never see something new and potentially something to change our lives for the better.

So what’s the plan? Well, sticking to the spirit of our working holiday visa we are planning to travel for our first two months. We’ll begin with a flight to Cairns and work our way south towards Sydney for Christmas and New Years; finally back to Melbourne in 2011. For the remainder of the year we’ll stay in Melbourne and get ourselves a place to stay and jobs and through out the year we’ll take breaks to see the rest of Australia including Ayres Rock (Uluru), The Great Ocean Road, Alice Springs and anywhere else the kangaroo’s want to take us!

We’ll keep you posted on our travels and perhaps we may even share a picture of a flaming galar if I find it!!!

---