Month: August 2013

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Criminals vs Rebels

Departing Australia

Australian friend: Well, we are a bunch of criminals over here.

Us: Is that considered better or worse than the bunch of violent rebels we come from?

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One of the things that has amazed us about Australia has been its similarity to the United States.  In some previous articles we talked about how the “imperfect mirror” taught us some pretty profound lessons about racism (theirs and ours) but the little things were just as fun.

We have the same TV shows
(2 and a half men is a big deal down under…who knew?)

we drive big cars
(Mad Max was an Australian movie…)

and we speak
(…’a horribly maimed version of’…)
the English language.

After all, we we’re both colonies formed by the same father country!

So as a salute to the continent that is a country and that constituted one of the largest single portions of our journey, here are some of the little things that made “down under” so interesting…

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What are the odds?

Kuta, Bali, Indonesia

There are those things you hear about but you assume the chances of them happening to you are just so scarce as to not even give it much thought.  Then, of course, it happens to you.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, so let’s start at the hotel.

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We managed to find a really nice place to stay for the few weeks we were on the beaches of Bali.  But “nice” has a lot of different meanings when you talk about international destinations…

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The Cancun of Australia

Kuta, Bali, Indonesia

Sailing out of Australia would have been a great idea except for two things:

1) We had arranged to meet Tiffany’s sister in Bali on a specific date.

2) Our work holiday visa in Australia was expiring fast.

As we’ve said before, a key element to being good crew is being able to be flexible.  Since we had to be somewhere at a specific time…oh and that our visas were set to expire in about 12 hours, flexibility was not something we had in abundance.

So a quick flight later and we found ourselves in what we’ve heard called the

 “Cancun of Australia”

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House or Travel?

Karumba, QLD, AU

As our time wound down in Australia we found ourselves having a difficult conversation about a choice we could not had foreseen coming when we first started this adventure.

Karumba beach sunset

Like we said last week, we had a good time “living the dream” and we were successful at said dream; we had completed what we originally set out to do.  Much more than what we originally planned actually, as this whole “sailing to Australia by way of Tahiti” kind of came together on the fly.  What we had not anticipated was that the dream would actually be fairly profitable. You see, Australia had been good to us on the job front and their wages for the jobs we worked were, when compared to the United States, 2 – 3 times higher than what we would have been paid in the states.  Alongside that we had watched our money very carefully and saved every chance we got.  Also don’t forget there were 2 of us. What that all boils down to is that when we originally planned our trip, we had not expected to leave Australia with a surplus of cash. As it turns out, we did have quite a reasonable surplus…which led us to a question we weren’t sure how to answer:

House or Travel?

Continue reading “House or Travel?”

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