I would like to share my story in the hope of inspiring you and perhaps, who knows, making you decide to take the plunge to travel to Australia. What made me want to leave France? How did I manage to become a resident of Australia? If you're interested, keep on reading.

 

 

THE MOMENT WHERE MY LIFE TOOK A TURN

 

First, let's start at the beginning. I unfortunately lost my mom when I was 19, she died of cancer at the young age of 43 years. My uncle, my mother's brother, died of cancer too at the age of 36 when I was 15 years old. For those who have never experienced the loss of loved ones, these moments hurt you a lot and a part of yourself goes missing. After attempting suicide due to depression, that was it! I woke up on the hospital bed, surrounded by my family who did not know what to do with the situation, that's when I started to realise that life is short, that it is up to me to make my choices and in order to be happy I will make my dreams come true. And my dream was to leave everything, family, friends, work and studies, to go and travel the world! Just this urge to explore other horizons instead of continuing education to find a job and live a daily boring routine life. Having a goal helped me to stop thinking about all the bad memories.

 

 

SAVING MONEY FOR THE TRIP 

 

I had to start 2 part-time jobs in Nice: in the morning, housekeeper at Le Méridien hotel; in the afternoon, cashier at the supermarket at Monoprix store, which allowed me to accumulate between 55 and 65 hours of work per week and of course to save for my trip. I started saving in July 2006, I was meant to keep working until June 2007, but I could not wait and knowing that I could work whilst in Australia in the worst case scenario, I went for it and bought my round-the-world flight ticket, valid for 1 year, for the month of March 2007. After the airfare paid for, I had $4,000 left to travel.

Keep in mind that at the time there were not as many websites for travelers, not as many travelers, and smart phones did not exist either. To use the internet I had to go to the internet cafe, line up to use a computer at times and then it took 10 minutes to upload one picture by email or on a blog OMG This was a real adventure, not knowing what to see and visit at each destination (I did not buy any travel guide either) but I met on a forum a girl of my age who did not want to travel solo either. I told her all about my plans and my round-the-world flight ticket. Since we were not from the same region in France, we decided to meet at London airport to fly to San Francisco.

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THE JOURNEY

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The journey plan was: London - San Francisco - Tahiti - New Zealand - Australia - London. I had in mind to travel to Asia depending on the money left after Australia. With my travel companion we spent 3 weeks on the west coast of the USA, visited San Francisco and surrounding area, Yosemite Park (to pronounce "Yosemiti" and not "Yosemite" as we learned haha), Los Angeles, Hollywood, San Diego as well as Las Vegas. We were lucky to be invited to the family of our friends to save on accommodation (Françoise will recognize herself). Same thing for Tahiti, Françoise kindly asked her cousin if we could be accommodated. Awesome !

It was in Tahiti that my travel companion and I went our separate ways because we no longer wanted to travel the same way. We told each other at the beginning: "no compromise, if we need to go our own ways we will".

Since I started to run low on money, I had to forget about New Zealand, but no regrets (although I could have worked there, but it was too cold for me)! I arrived in Sydney with a young man I met while traveling in French Polynesia. He knew some people in Melbourne and Adelaide where we could stay for free for a week or so. He had to go back to France 2 weeks later to start working. After saying good bye at the airport and spending 2 days without knowing what to do or what to say to the other backpackers around me, I had to force myself out of my comfort zone, stop being shy and finally start having fun as a solo backpacker!

 

TO BE CONTINUED - PART 2