Conclusion: The Bike Trip and Australia

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Conclusion: The Bike Trip and Australia

We had biked from Bangkok to Singapore in fifty days, with 37 of those days spent actually biking. We had traveled 2335 km, or about 1406 miles. During that time, it had rained nearly every day. We’d had only six flat tires, five back, one front. We had taken three rides in trucks and one ride on a train. We had seen dozens of dead snakes, lizards, cats and dogs, run over on the roadside. I had completely worn out my brakes and needed a replacement, while J’s brakes were fine. (I was a much more cautious rider.)

The bikes had cost $280 each. Our bike supplies had set us back $320 each. We had each suffered three terrible sunburns. There had been zero bad accidents. J had fallen off his bike, suffering minor injuries, four times, me, only once. We had visited three countries, stayed in thirty-nine hotels and been invited to stay in the home of locals twice. It had been a wonderful and spontaneous journey, with every day full of wonderful surprises.

We’d never gotten sick from eating fresh roadside food and drinks each day. We’d always been accompanied by friendly, curious locals, waving to us, honking, smiling at us, offering us rides or fruit. We’d discovered that Muslim people are friendly, kind and tolerant, shattering the false impressions given to us by the American media.

Upon arriving in Australia, we’d been cold for two straight months. And it wasn’t as easy to get a job in the mining industry as we’d heard. But we did find well-paying jobs, quickly. Within one week of arriving in Australia, we were working side-by-side, cooking, running the entire kitchen of an upscale café, five hours south of Perth, in an adorable seaside town called Albany. Using mainly our powers of persuasion, our confidence and our apparent likeability, we had negotiated our way in to head chef and assistant chef cooking jobs, despite both having little professional cooking experience. We had negotiated a six-day a week, ten-hour a day set up where we’d be able to make and save a lot of money. And our bosses had a lovely apartment, overlooking the bay, that they rented to us for $50 a week.

Six months we stayed in this darling little town, working hard and saving thousands of dollars a month. We learned to cook and bake very well and to manage and run a restaurant kitchen. We worked well together and enjoyed the freedom to experiment with new recipes as we pleased. We had the pleasure of working only with fresh, local ingredients, as the rural town was surrounded by large farms. We met some nice people and I missed Laos badly. Right before we left, we sold our bikes. I was able to sell mine for $488 US, or $750 Australian, meaning the bike and all the supplies cost me just $147 to use for 9 months. For some reason, J had more trouble selling his, and was only able to get $450 Australian, still not a bad sum.

After our six month contract ended, we happily departed Albany, and visited some of my friends around Australia, before stopping for twelve hours in Singapore, three weeks in Luang Prabang, Laos, and then returning home to our families in central Massachusetts, in the United States. I had been away for a year and a half, J for one year. It had been a series of glorious, glorious adventures on the other side of the world and it felt good to be home again.

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