The first 2 weeks

Greetings,

As this is my first real post since I'm in Australia I'll do a quick introduction and explain you the plan. My name is Kevin Hansen and I decided to travel to Australia, hopefully for 1 year but the duration of my stay will all depend on whether I find work or not. My good friend Sam is traveling along with me. We are planning to go all around Australia, starting from perth, then heading north towards Darwin, and after that we'll probably go down the east coast and then maybe go more inlands towards Alice Springs. Atleast that's the general idea, because as I've already found out, you can't plan to much out here as there will be a lot of unexpected events.

 So how is Perth? Quite awesome to be honest, Perth is an absolutely beautiful city, from the tall skyscrapers in the Central Business District to quiet beaches, everything has been made to please the eye. I can't quite comprehend the amount of walking we did around the city as it's a LOT. The city motivates people to have an active lifestyle, plenty of outdoor fitness areas and a lot of parks where everyone is jogging,doing yoga or any other kind of activity. In the evening you can relax at the many public squares where people meet and can watch outdoor "cinemas". Or if you're more into drinking in a pub you can go to the many bars spread around the city, I however found that the prices for a beer are way to high, as it's like 3x as much as what I'm used to paying in Belgium. We did find a cheaper way to get drunk, which is drinking "Goone" or "Plonk" as I prefer calling it, this is cheap local wine, which you can get for as low as $15 for 4L, so needless to say, we bought a lot of that.

 As far as accomodation goes, there are plenty of backpacker hostels which start from $25/night with a lot of like-mnded backpackers. Some just passing through and other staying there for longer times to work. Or, like the case with us, needing an adress for your tax number and bank card to be posted to. We first stayed in a really small hostel called "Ozy Inn" which was alright, but Sam didn't really like that one as it was quite dirty. After spending 2 nights there we decided to check out another hostel, a lot bigger and cleaner called "The Old Swan Barracks". This one looked amazing when we entered it so we decided to book a week there. I have to say I did prefer the Ozy Inn as it felt more friendly and social but I can enjoy myself anywhere, and I did that for sure in the Swan Barracks. Staying at a dorm with 6 people we met a few nice people there. Bill, a swedish guy who slept in the same room as us, and Stefan, a fellow Belgian who was already working in Perth.

One thing I have to add is that the aboriginals in Perth are absolutely aweful people, begging, yelling and even attacking people, to keep it short they're just dangerous people whom you should avoid. This one night a german girl called Sabrina got assaulted by an aboriginal lady because she was wearing a short skirt, and an aboriginal man was looking at her, I had to come in between and try to keep the aboriginal lady away from her. Sadly there was no reasening with her, and the only reply I got was to "fuck off". They eventually called the cops and they took her away. I have a feeling the aboriginals will be a lot different when heading out of the big city's though, so I won't make this my final judgement.

After you've seen all the nice places in Perth it's time to take some small trips to places like Fremantle, Cottesloe, Scarborough beach and many others. The one place I regret not having the chance visit is Rottnest Island, it's a beautiful island only like 20km's from Perth where you can go snorkling, cycling or just enjoying the lovely nature. We were lucky that when we visited Cottesloe there was this nice event called "Sculptures By The Sea" where all kinds of artists present their work.

After a while I started to notice my budget was dropping quite fast so we decided to start looking for a job, we didn't go the the place where most of the backpackers go called margareth river where there are lots of vineyards, but we went to Northam on advice of a local I know. When we arrived here we quickly noticed that there wasn't any work here either, they are experiencing a massive drought just now. It hasn't rained for over 90 days in the entire Perth region. So all the farmers are basicly waiting for it to start raining so they can finally get back to work. I called around to farmers and working hostels and it was the same situation everywhere, even in the Margareth River region.

We started looking for places a lot further away, since staying here seems quite pointless, and I remembered this place called Kununurra. It's a farming town like 3000km from here. I did some calls there and was glad to hear that they haven't had any drought whatsoever, Actually it's still the raining season right now and it's ending in about 1 week, so the perfect timing to go there, just before the fruit picking season starts. We researched how we can go there and booked it all on my cellphone. We will take a train to Perth, 100km from here. Then we'll take a 3500km flight to Darwin where we stay a few nights and then we'll take a 12 hour bus to Kununurra. So we got quite a big trip ahead of us. The region around Darwin is absolutely amazing though, they have great beaches, the have the worlds most amazing national park "Kakadu' and so many other things. I'm looking forward to the pool at the hostel we booked.

So now we're here, in small local town of Northam, waiting for our train to arrive in a few hours, then we'll have to sleep in the airport as our flight leaves at 8AM, not looking forward to that at all. But ah well.. It's all part of the adventure, and I'm really loving it so far!

I'm having some problems uploading photo's so I'll do that later, anyway, thanks for reading this big wall of text! :)

The idea of traveling to Australia...

I got the idea of traveling to Australia from a friend that I met on my travels in Japan. It was an evening in Tokyo, walking around with my brother, I think we were trying to find some brewery at that time which we never found. Later that night we were gonna meet up with some folks I met along my travels, we were gonna have dinner and some beers or sake at a local izakaya which is some kind of combination between a bar and a restaurant. While we were walking around I felt the urge to smoke a cigarette, in Tokyo you can't just smoke anywhere you want on the streets and they had a spot outlined on the corner of a crossroad where you were allowed to smoke. While lighting my cigarette I noticed a foreign guy standing there as well, as social as I am when traveling abroad I didn't hesitate to start talking to him. Apparently he had just arrived that day in Tokyo, he told me he was from France but he had been traveling for the last year or some.

Some of the people we were meeting with were French so i told him he could tag along if he would like, he agreed and we started heading towards the place we had all agreed to go to. If i remember correctly we ordered a bottle of sake, or at least we thought so. When we poured our drinks and took a first sip, me and my brother looked at each other with disbelief, this was something else. We remembered the taste from a week before when we ordered a similar drink called "shoshu" which was this beverage of between 20%-40% which tastes absolutely awe full. Needless to say we got quite drunk from that bottle and we were all talking and having fun, anyhow this must have been the point where Alx, the French guy i met earlier, started to talk about how he has been traveling in Australia and booked a flight to explore Japan as well. I might be wrong but that's sort off how I remember it.

I asked him quite a few questions about his travels to Australia as I was completely fascinated by this way of traveling, we drank up the bottle, had a few more drunken conversations, and after a while we were all getting quite tired and said we were going to bed. We exchanged contacts and arranged to meet tomorrow with the whole group as we were going to explore some more parts of the beautiful city Tokyo. Me and my brother went back to the hostel we were staying at and I'm sure I must have thought about Australia that night as it never really got out of my mind after that.

After Japan I didn't think that much about it anymore as I was still in awe of what a wonderful journey I had had in japan, I went back to my daily life of work and partying and whatever I do here in Belgium. During my journeys in Japan I had already arranged my next holiday with one of my best friends Ian, I think it was my holiday to Norway where he was working at the moment. Then when I was in Norway we decided to plan another holiday to a crazy festival in Ukraine called kazantip. This festival lasted 2 weeks and looking at the videos online this was going to be amazing! We even planned a short road trip trough Romania and Moldavia as the people joining us on that holiday were from those country's.

This year had been crazy for me and I really got the hang of traveling now, when I was in Belgium I got really bored and wanted to go somewhere, that's when I recalled my conversations about Australia and started to research how this could be done. Shortly after I ordered my visa for Australia and I knew this was gonna be the cherry on the cake. Sam, another one of my best friends seemed quite interested in this idea and he decided that he was gonna come as well.

Now here I am am, one month from now I will be in Australia, I can only imagine the life I will have there, a full year in a foreign country on the other side of the globe. It's going to amazing for sure!

My introduction

Hello,

I'm Kevin, a real fan of traveling and anything related to it. before I start I want to tell you all that I have never really written anything, except for those short stories I wrote as a kid. I hope this will be better then those as those really didn't make any sense at all, so don't expect to much of my writing skills.

I don't know what it is about traveling that makes me feel so happy, I guess it's the freedom of being away from the daily chore that's called life. When i'm away from home all my troubles seem to fade away and all I can think of is of how I can make the most out of this time away from all the stress that exists in my daily life. I used to be a boy scout and I loved the days when we went out in the wild, sure I got home with bruises and all but that didn't bother me at all, because I had been in the wild! Nature always inspired me, I could really be me there, it doesn't matter what you look like or how you act because nature just doesn't give a shit.

My first real traveling experiences where when we went to Hungary with my family, we always went to this small town called Tiszafüred. The first time I went there was when I was 1 year old, needless to say I don't remember anything from that, but my family kept going to that same place every year, so when I got older I knew the place like my back pocket. The people there where always incredibly friendly and although they didn't have much they where always very generous to me. This amazed me to say the least, as the average Belgian folks are quite uptight, especially in the city.

When I got older it was my turn to go on my own holidays, I went to all kinds of places, mostly in eastern Europe as this was quite affordable. And of course my snowboarding holidays which were amazing as I really became fond of this new sport I had discovered. From now on I was hooked to traveling and wanted to see as much of the world as possible so I started going on holidays quite often. My most memorable holiday must be Japan with my brother, but I will probably dedicate a whole blog message to that one!


Now, 23 years old, and a lot of experiences later, I want to start to really travel. Going further, and staying away for longer times then the average 1-3 week holiday. So I booked my flight to Australia, for the first time in my life I booked a single flight, hoping to stay away for at least one year and figuring out how I'll pay for it along the way. My backpacking story has begun!

So here it is, my blog, The Travels of Kevin. I hope my life or at least some parts of it are worth reading that I won't bore you to death. I will be keeping a journal with me on my journey trough Australia so I can make it possible to tell you all the spicy details on the events to follow.

A special thanks to Michelle for inspiring me to start this blog!

Thanks for reading, and I hope you will read my next post as well.