I’m Going Back to Australia

I first visited Australia back in 2019. I had bought a one-way ticket from Vancouver, the city where I had spent the last 12 years, originally intending to go for a six-week backpacking trip around the vast country before heading back to Canada. I'm heading back again nearly seven years later at the end of 2025 and my life has changed so vastly in that time.

Australia (and New Zealand, where I ended up going instead of Canada) had been on my radar since I was in my early teens, having seen ads on the television for both countries during breaks of my favourite programmes. After graduating university, I spent a few years working full-time solely saving up in order to be able to finally book a flight and "go see the world".

At the end of 2018, I quit my job, bought a ticket from Vancouver to Sydney (via China), put my belongings in a storage unit and headed down under.

→ Check out my blog post about why I bought my one-way ticket to Australia in 2019!

Funnily enough, since boarding that one-way flight - even though it was intended to be a six-week backpacking trip - I have never been back to Canada, not even to step foot as a brief visitor. Instead, I carried on to New Zealand, living there for nearly two years on a working holiday visa.

→ Check out my blog post about 100 things I love about New Zealand, the last I wrote about the country!

I finished that blog post ^ with a simple sentence: "I planned to come to New Zealand for 40 days. I stayed for 568."

From there, our visas having ran out (and with our stay already extended thanks to COVID), I followed my then-boyfriend back to his home country of Belgium to start my European chapter. I would end up living in Belgium for a year.

→ Check out my blog post about moving to Belgium!

After a year in Belgium, in 2021, I moved solo to Salzburg, a small mountain town in Austria. I'd visited Salzburg just once before, aged five, and have no memory of the trip, just a few precious photographs.

The move from Belgium was a difficult one, the first one I'd done not out of my own choice. So, while I spent much of my time technically living in Austria, I found myself running away a lot (or, running towards and trying to reclaim the feeling of freedom). I had a remote job, one I'd started while living in Brussels, and the freedom of that job enabled me to see much of the continent, with holidays taken across the globe.

When I moved to Austria, my country count stood at 27. While based there over the past four years, I have been to 48 new countries on five continents, bringing my total to 75, plus I revisited ten of those original 27. So if anything, moving to Europe did nothing to slow down my travel, rather, it fully vamped it up.

→ Check out everywhere I've been in the world so far!

In mid-July of 2024, I decided it was time to quit my job. I'd been working at the same company for three and a half years, had had two promotions and had worked for two different teams. The final role I was in was no longer serving my mental health and I chose to prioritize myself. I planned to take what I coined an "adult gap year", given that I was age 28 and gap years are normally taken ten years younger at age 18.

→ Check out the reel I made about quitting my job!

My "adult gap year" saw me travel across new countries in Eastern Europe, finally take a deep dive into Italy, spend six weeks hanging out with my parents where they're currently living in California, ring in the New Year in Sweden, backpack across five countries in Central America, visit New York City for the first time (albeit on a layover) and explore so much of Europe into the summer of 2025.

One of the biggest life changes coincided exactly with me quitting my job. Two weeks after I handed in my notice, I was at the Adele concert in Munich during her one-month residency at her custom-built stadium. Stuck in traffic after the concert alongside the 80,000 other concertgoers, my friend and I passed the time swiping on Tinder on Munich-based men.

I woke up the following Sunday, quite late, having gotten home at 4am after the long drive back from Munich to Salzburg, to a message from Tobi, offering to meet for coffee. I told him I was already back in Salzburg by now; he drove three hours to meet me for our first date.

We spent one week going on dates in Austria and Germany, hiking, playing tennis, swimming in lakes and going to outdoor cinemas. But I was off on my aforementioned "adult gap year" and I told him long distance with someone I had just met wasn't going to work. He didn't mind - in fact, he offered to come visit me in Italy. He did so, twice.

In fact, he was the one I cut my California trip short to spend Christmas in Europe with; who drove us all the way up to Stockholm for New Year's; who I backpacked across three of my five Central American countries with; who I explored so much of Europe with during the summer of 2025.