What we learned from travelling the world!

What we learned from travelling the world!

Travelling the world doesn't just happen on a whim, it needs careful planning and an appreciation of the risks and consequences of being out of the road for a long period of time. It takes wear and tear on our minds and bodies and with every amazing item ticked off our bucket lists we have half a dozen more experiences of adversity and hardship getting there!

Our planning started at least 2 years ahead of actually taking off on that first plane jouney, although it had felt the right thing to do for so many years. It was exciting times; we had everything to look forward to and felt excited every day to get more books and search more google pages on the places we wanted to visit and started planning our journey to start a new, and what was to become our biggest challenge yet.

To make it even ore challenging, like it needed to be, we were leaving everything and everyone behind and with only the backpacks on our back we ventured off to the great unknown on our way to emigrate to a new life in Australia!

We’d semi-planned a route we wanted to take via several other continents and countries and created a bucket list to visit some of the most amazing places we’d only ever dreamed of being in before.

We were seasoned travellers, or so we thought! Getting the culture shock of our life on landing in our first country was a big wakeup call testing our resilience to the limit. With adrenal glands in overdrive, our regrets started to surface very quickly; we were constantly doubting ourselves on the choices we’d made and felt we hadn’t actually spent enough time preparing after all. Was this all going to be worth it?! And could we even succeed in this challenge?

Every experience we had, brought new and novel challenges; it was exhausting at times. We realised how naïve we were and how painful it was to keep putting ourselves in these situations when all the messages we were getting and giving ourselves was that we weren’t coping and life would be so much easier for us if we just packed in the travelling and headed straight for Australia. We were so far out of our comfort zone for sure!

It crossed our minds so many times to give up, however the experiences we had were all worth it. The longer we spent on the road the more desensitised we became to it and the more we focused on the good times and the rosouces we were building for the next one.

We didn’t want to let ourselves down and so decided to slow things down a bit and spend more money paying for better and safer places to stay and visit. We realised we’d made some bad decisions and started to reassess the rest of the itinerary to see what other changes we could make for a smoother ride.

We realised that by spending more quality time in places, we could plan and experience more good things to balance things out. We never booked ahead more than one plane ride or one homestay unless we had to, to ensure that if a place felt unsafe when we got there, we could move on to somewhere else more quickly.

We landed in Australia in 2012 having successfully navigated our world travel adventure for over 9 months, landing in 26 countries over 7 continents. We experienced so many things we’ll probably never experience again, and well aware what most will never experience in their lifetime. The adventure got better and better the more experience we have and the more desensitised we became.

We kept a detailed journal and photo library of all our daily experiences while on the road to look back at once we had settled. Having revisited that diary in its entirety now over 3 times which takes months to read, we are so glad that we and had a detailed an honest record of it in its entirety and that we did it and persisted despite all the adversities we experienced. It certainly prepared us well for dealing with the unexpected and uncertainty of starting a new life down under and beyond!


What else did we learn...?

  • No matter how much or how hard we plan we have to be prepared to veer off or persist when things are not working
  • If something is worth fighting for, we’ll find a will and a way to make it happen
  • Some experiences are worth feeling unsafe or insecure about, we just can’t know unless we persist and be willing to find out
  • Having someone else at hand to help with decision making, taking calculated risks, and feeling safe with, helps us to feel comforted and stay focused on our goals
  • Having positive thoughts and experiences to balance out the not so good ones helps us to put things in perspective
  • If we’re feeling out of control finding ways to make things more controllable can help us to cope better. We’re never likely to mitigate every risk of any given situation, but we sure can plan ahead and do what we can with what resources we have available at the time
  • When we persist and build resilience and confidence in ourselves, we realise we can achieve so much more than we ever thought we could. Those experiences lead us to take more educated risks and put ourselves in places where we can seek more opportunities in future
  • Having no regrets, only lessons, give us comfort that we don’t need to hold ourselves back in taking the next step forward no matter how small or insignificant it might seem!

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