Advertisement
Published: December 29th 2012
Edit Blog Post
Ladies, gentlemen, friends, family, boys & girls, I trust this finds you in a comfortable seat as you find us at the beginning of our grand adventure. For some time now Anna and I have been set on emigrating to Australia. Leaving behind the isle I’ve called home from birth in search of new opportunities and to change to the way we live in Anna’s homeland.
You find us having just left the country after working out our notice at jobs, packing boxes for shipping and attempting to squirrel away as many stray pounds as we can manage.
In the coming months we intend to travel from here in Berlin to Singapore. This trip will take us through Helsinki and Tallinn before heading across Russia to China. After China we head through Vietnam into Cambodia and on through Thailand and Malaysia to get to Singapore. Once there we plan to get a flight into Australia.
I felt the need to add a page at the start of this leg of our travelblog to cover some of the experiences we’ve had during our preparations that I haven’t found described anywhere.
Lets wind back a year or so for
The Purple Turtle
No night out into reading is compete without sampling the delights within... moment, so there we are enjoying life in our reasonably comfortable, if only one bed roomed, rented apartment. We have an eclectic collection of friends from a variety of disciplines and with a wide experience of many parts of the globe. Anna and I have been talking about places we’d like to visit and trips we’d like to take with most that will listen, exchanging tales of our plans from experiences people have had. We’d been regular visitors to a backpackers travel show and this only helped fuel our desires for more area’s we wanted to explore. We looked at the ever growing wish list of places and decided that if we were going to do this we needed to do it in one go as it wouldn’t take much to string all the places together. So the bigger plan began to form of moving to Australia. On the way we’ve plans to visit 10 countries and cover half the planet over land.
So back to this year, I put in my application for my immigration to Australia, and contrary to the advice they give you, began working out my six month notice period. Around the same time the
Leaving cake from friends
Awesomely chocolaty cake at the end of a fantastic dinner. planning kicked up a notch as we now had a trip start date and a finite income in which to find any additional funds we needed for the trip. Anna is an amazingly organised individual, as many will vouch for, but none more than I, having being the focus of that a few times during our time together. Anna began working on stringing things together and an epic document began to form. It all started as a simple project file to give an outline of where we were going and how to link between them all. It ended up as a fully formatted multi paged web linked spreadsheet, the likes of which I’d never imagined was possible. The end result gave us enough information to supply everything required for Russian and Chinese tourist visas and get the first few months of the trip booked in.
Next step was a visit to see a travel specialist nurse at our local NHS walk in centre. After describing where we wanted to go, we found we had similar travel idea to the nurse. He became very enthusiastic about our adventure having done a similar trip in his youth. His advice on which vaccinations we needed and which were an option as well as their side effects was invaluable. Having settled on what we were having we began a course of 12 individual jabs over a 10 week period. Something to remember if you’re planning on a trip, it’s much easier and far less painful to do these jabs over a longer time frame, so plan ahead and get these done early.
From then it was all down to researching the rest of our trip. Chance meetings of people in pubs with stories of their trips as well as ratifying the information we found in travel guides seemed to provide an even greater list of places we couldn’t miss.
Over the last few weeks activity has moved up a gear, having less than 10 weeks to go we began to prepare our personal effects for shipping. After several conversations with my step brother we loaded all that we wouldn’t be taking on our back into shipping boxes and filling out the itemised paperwork for customs and insurance listing. With a van four times the size we needed, loaded with all the boxes we headed out for Felixstowe to drop it all off ready for shipping.
All this brings us to the weekend before Christmas, with excitement building, both of us had finished work, so we had a last big night out in our home town of Reading in Berkshire. Much fun was had by all those friends that made it and, with no night being complete without it, we ended the night in the famous Purple Turtle bar.
Christmas week went by so quickly, with visits to see my family as well as our friends. We had a final sending off with our closest friends at a fantastic restaurant in Guildford, before being taken to the airport the next morning for our flight to Berlin to start our journey.
This all brings us up to today, sat in our hotel next to checkpoint Charlie, without it really having sunk in that were about to travel half way round the world to start a new life.
As time and internet connections allow we’ll endeavour to update this with as much info as we can.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.065s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 17; qc: 33; dbt: 0.0286s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
me
non-member comment
Wow
Surfs up and waiting for you.