Off the Couch and On the Road

It seemed a lifetime later, though it was really only about a year, when I boarded my flight home, with as much anticipation about arriving as I had about leaving. I hadn’t counted on the world being so fascinating, so beautiful and scary, so addictive. In short, I hadn’t expected to love the anarchy of travelling as much as I did. I left a planner and came back a traveller.

As I thought back over the entire year, I realised that the moments that epitomised my trip, that I looked on with fond memories, were ones I could never have captured in photographs, that I couldn’t hand over to a fellow traveller with a phone number and instructions on how to book. When I looked at advertisements in travel agency windows and smiled, saying ‘I’ve been there’, it didn’t so much remind me of looking at the pyramids themselves, for example, as when we all threw ourselves into the Nile on inflatable toys and felt the sun on our faces and the cool water on our feet. Or when I sat next to a praying nun looking up at heavenly art in St Peters Basilica, or viewed sunset over the Greek islands, or saw the majestic Lion rest after a kill on the Masai Mara.

Surprising then, that I settled into life fairly quickly after arriving back in Sydney. I found myself a great job in PR in the tourism industry, and worked on getting the new house and a few other things on my list.

There was a second list though – 4W-driving through the Australian outback, trekking Maccu Pichu and the Grand Canyon, Irish pubs, the famous Trans-Mongolian railway, Michaelangelo’s David, the streets of Prague and the city of New York…true, I wouldn’t be able to do them in a year, but I would try for a lifetime.

-Sarah

Our time in Vancouver passed swiftly, the only real measurement being the seemingly sudden change from sunny days warmed by the kaleidescope of fall colours, to the cold, bare trees and bright white of winter snow.

Working in a coffee shop during the week, we spent our weekends sightseeing in Vancouver, mostly on foot, standing on Capilano suspension bridge overlooking mountains of fir trees one day, and walking the entire circumference of Stanley park the next.

The wages were terrible, by Australian standards, and so we neither ventured far nor lived it up, but as I told those who sounded amazed that we weren’t going ‘there’, living and working in a different country was a travelling experience in itself, right? (And then I cried because, damn it, we could afford to go ‘there’, wherever it was).

Being Sydney girls, we were amazed by the snow and it’s everchanging state, and began to look at the clouds as perhaps Tim Bailey might, and nod, mumbling to ourselves that yes, there would be snow tonight.

We shopped and dined, danced and drank, slept and watched movies, and became intensely familiar with the names of streets, the neighbourhoods, friends and customers – until one day someone asked me where I was from and I stared blankly at them, replying, “Oh, just down on West 13th”.

We fell in love with Vancouver, especially over the holiday season, where Santa and his thermal coast and sleigh made perfect sense, and we could make snowmen in our front yard and hum tunes about Jack Frost nipping at our noses, with ease. We had dreamed of a white Christmas – and although we both worked Christmas day and trudged through the freezing sleet/snow/rain there and back – I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

In retrospect of course. Ideally we would have been sipping hot chocolates on a mountain resort somewhere, watching chestnuts roast and whatnot, but damn it, we couldn’t afford to go ‘there’ either.

-Sarah

And so it was that after seven months of travelling – of packing and repacking, waiting in airports and taxis, haggling and deciphering maps, laying on beaches and gazing in museums – I had found a place to settle, for a little while, at least.

It was luxurious, a studio within a heritage house in the suburbs, where I could enjoy a real bed and a bath, central heating, free phone calls and internet (the pinnacle of a travellers wish list). The sister and I slept in, watched TV, went shopping, read books and enjoyed the changing colours from fall into winter, like a rainy weekend that never ended.

We half-heartedly looked for work, turning up for some interviews and not for others – started work in a fashion retail store one day and quit the next. Once we both happily secured jobs in a coffee shop and were planning the weekly shopping list, it hit me. I needed to leave, to go somewhere, to see something. Man, I needed to travel.

“Let’s go somewhere,” I casually mentioned to the sister, who had endured flight delays, typhoons in Taiwan and a night in a dodgy hostel with a buddist monk to finally arrive in Vancouver less than a week before.

“Sure,” she said dryly. “Whatever.”

Visions of trekking Maccu Pichu, shopping in New York and horse riding in the Grand Canyon immediately sprung to mind. I was just about to whip out the credit card when she made her point.

“But we can’t afford to go now. We’ll work and then we’ll travel,” she said.

Right. Good point. For now, we were settled, back on the couch. For a little while, at least.

-Sarah

The 15-hour bus ride from Calgary to Vancouver seemed to pass three times as fast as a 5-hour flight ever could. I spent most of that time trying to find an adjective appropriate in describing the colour of the water at the base of the snow-capped mountains in Banff National Park. It was clearly cold, frozen at some points, rushing at others, sometimes so still as to perfectly reflect the leaves from the tree branches above.

Tinffany blue, I decided, and then immediately regretted my choice. Tiffany’s didn’t exactly conjure up images of stunning mountains surrounded by low clouds, snowflakes melting in the blinding sun. But it was Tiffany blue, I thought. Perfectly.

The scenery made the trip somewhat enjoyable, though by the time I had arrived at 9.30pm in Vancouver, British Columbia, I was so tired I couldn’t muster up any excitement of being in a new city. And this could be the city – the house and job and real life city, for a few months at least – so the pressure was on for it to be palatable. A new day would tell.

I woke the next morning to clear blue skies, not-so-cold temperatures and a boundless energy usually reserved for end-of-season sales. And Vancouver was beautiful. I walked from one side of the harbour, across the city, to the other, and window-shopped, explored and sat in the sun admiring the yachts, thinking that instead of a choice of which neighbourhood I did want to live in, I would be hard pressed to find a neighbourhood I didn’t.

Palatable? Definitely. The sister was arriving in two days, joining me for the last leg of my adventure, and I couldn’t wait to have someone to discover the city with. And slightly expand my wardrobe options too, of course.

-Sarah

It snowed on my third day in Calgary. Snowed. Is it just me or does it seem completely insane that I was snorkelling one minute and being snowed on the next?

After a lengthy discussion with the immigration guy on where I should live in Canada, (‘Well m’aam, you got the choice of being very cold or very wet. And some places you got the choice of being both.’) I was stamped through as a working resident of Canada for 12 months and crashed on my hostel bed for a long, deep sleep.

Calgary is a very pretty town, small enough to view the countryside and mountains from a few floors up but developed enough for a city feel, with skyscrapers and malls galore. It was ironic to see the fall colours in abundance – yellows, reds and browns, some tree branches already bare – like a memory I have only experienced vicariously through TV and books.

I had three days in Calgary, one of those spent recovering from jetlag and the other two in bed, sick from what I have decided to call the now familiar ‘Sarah-moves-continents’ flu. Which meant I didn’t really see much of Alberta, so I don’t really have much to report. Except that it snowed.

-Sarah