Logistics And The Confusion Of Solitude

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I think it's the default for Australians that when you say 'travel' they think 'overseas'.

You say "I'm thinking of going travelling again" no-one is going to think you mean anywhere on our own continent.
We don't talk about it like that.

It isn't that Australia isn't freaking huge and that going from one side to the other isn't a pretty impressive undertaking but the language we use tend to downplay it a bit.

It might partly be because when we travel our own country there are a LOT of bits that most people skip unless they're feeling particularly intrepid and enjoy off-roading.

You go for a 10 hour drive in Europe and you will cross several countries, each with their own languages, sights to see, cuisines and places to stay.

You go for a 10 hour drive in Australia and unless you're going around the coast odds are you better have some spare tanks of fuel, a good supply of water, a tent, and possibly an EPIRB.

There are whole chunks of the country that are either too much trouble, too dangerous, or too barren to be of much interest to anyone except scientists and prospectors*.

But wide stretches of sun-baked desert aside, when I think 'I haven't been travelling for a while' what I mean is 'I haven't been overseas for a while'.

I do want to see more of my own country but it has never been a pressing thing.

It'd be a lot easier to do regularly than getting the money together to fly around the globe but it just doesn't pop up as an automatic option.

Unless you're heading to the coast or the slopes, people tend to be a little bit surprised if you say you're heading somewhere on the mainland without a particular reason.

You live in Melbourne and you're heading over to Perth?
You got family over there?
You don't?
There some kind of event you're attending?
There isn't? You're just interested?
And it isn't school/summer holidays?
Oh... OK, fair enough...?

I'm probably overplaying it a bit but if I told my family I was going on a month's trip in Europe by myself, hiring a car and tooling about a bit they'd wish me good luck, tell me to be careful and to bring them back some souvenirs.

If I told them I was going to take my car and go on a roadtrip up the coast by myself they'd be a bit baffled.

Travelling to another continent by yourself = makes perfect sense.

Travelling around our own own country by yourself = a bit odd?

It's something people are supposed to save up until they retire, buy a caravan and become a grey nomad.

The thing that kicked off this train of thought is my wanting to follow through on my camping obsession a bit more regularly and realising that if I actually want to get it done I'll probably have to do it by myself.
My friends and family all have jobs, financial commitments or restrictions, and/or children and pets to wrangle.

Getting them to come camping would involve a lot of forewarning and planning, could by necessity only take place during particular times of the year if I wanted certain people to be able to come and could end up with me banging my head against a wall because argh complicated!

I could probably arrange a few short trips with different people but anything longer would involve a bit of fiddling about.

Same with if I wanted to go and see a bit of Tasmania or Queensland.

People either might not have the money or the freedom to get away.

So if I don't want to hang around and put it off that means I have to look at whether I want to do it by myself.

And the answer to that is... kind of?

There are parts of the country I could quite happily go and see by myself.
Go and spend a week on the beach up on the sunshine coast, go on some nature walks in the rainforests and national parks in New South Wales and Queensland, go camping and checking out various towns in Tasmania.
But there are other parts of the country I'd like to see with other people, some of the cities and certain landmarks or areas.

There are some things that you really want someone to be standing with you for, just so you can turn to them and say 'hey, look at that, isn't it amazing?'

There are other things you can enjoy quite easily by yourself.

There might be a bit of 'how you think things will go' vs 'reality', in that depending on what kind of person you are spending that amount of time by yourself could either be freeing or make you feel a bit anxious.
And the driving involved in a long roadtrip by yourself could either be meditative or brain-meltingly boring.

It's hard to say.


So I've got two tasks in front of me:

• having a proper think about which parts of my own country I want to explore; and
• explaining to people that I'm going on a trip by myself and no I've not gone crazy, got depressed, or decided to 'find myself'.

This could take a while.



*Apparently this is becoming a thing again!

Going Wild

For the last year or so, my brain has obviously been developing some new neural pathways or mutating for maximum efficiency of getting really excited about random stuff because every couple of weeks it seems to bail me up in the corner like a cheerful drunk at a party and go 'HEY, YOU REMEMBER WHEN-' and just won't shut up about whatever it is into at the moment.

One of the things it's been yammering about recently is camping.

My family hasn't been camping for years.

The last time I remember was... 2004, just before I had my wisdom teeth out and was consigned to the scrap heap with the rest of the unwise.

And I haven't got any friends who go camping regularly - if at all - so I haven't gone on any exciting non-family camping trips since then either.

But at the moment it is all I can think about.

I want to go camping.

I want to put a tent, an air mattress, a sleeping bag, a handful of clothes and a bucketful of bug spray into my car and piss off somewhere camping.

I know that there is a nostalgia factor.

That there are things about camping that are extra annoying in any setting and things that are extra annoying in specific settings*.

I like the simplicity of only having what you brought with you.

No paralysis of choice on what to do because you've only got what you brought with you and the location you're in as options.

I like waking up going 'Jesus Christ, it must be like 10am! I must have slept in like crazy because it is BAKING in here!' and getting out of your tent to find that it's actually 7:30am and pleasantly mild once you're not inside a synthetic chamber of temperature amplification.

I like not having electricity because you have to REALLY want to finish that chapter in the book to sit there holding a book in one hand and a torch in the other.
Or with a torch clamped between chin and neck.
Or with the torch stuck in your mouth like the world's most unsuccessful pacifier.

I like being able to sit around in a folding chair or flop around in a hammock and not having to think 'I should get up and do that housework/shopping/organising/mending' because you've left all that bullshit at home.

I like the food, even when you cock it up.

It's handy that this trek in Nepal is going to have a camping component so I can calm my jonesing body down and get it to focus on other things that its sudden resurgent camping addiction**.

And when I get back and it's all summer and lovely, I might somehow manage to fit in some camping.

Though I'll be fighting the rest of Australia to find room anywhere decent at that time of year...



*In specific settings this will either relate to the terrain, the weather, or your fellow campers (e.g. drunks staggering home loudly late at night or tiny children running about screaming ridiculously early in the morning. Though if the kids run screaming around the tents of those shitty drunks while they're getting over their hangovers... Heh heh.)

**In Nepal I'll probably be distracted from my camping addiction by how tired I am and how my feet don't love me no more.