’Are we there yet?’

Our walk from the hostel to the restaurant that first night was in an entirely new world, but I was struggling to notice it. Rosa and Theo were both trying to help me shake off the sack I was carrying around with me – we had made it to Australia, we were here…!

I understood what they meant, we had come so far and I did want to feel the wonder of it all, but I also didn’t want to rush to forget that we had had to fly.

None of us like sitting with uncomfortable truths, or things we do that are a bit crap. There’s a balance between the hair shirt and washing your hands. I didn’t want to beat myself up but neither did I want to ignore what I’d done…I was struggling to celebrate our achievement when the end was a bust!

I was grateful we had four days before we got to Sydney, this wasn’t how I wanted to feel when we arrived at my sister’s…time was what I needed.

I looked up at the darkening sky and at least started to notice where we were. On that half hour walk we saw four different types of parrots and an ibis – (a bin chicken, my sister calls them) …and then out of nowhere (or more likely some nearby trees) huge bats began criss-crossing the sky… looking every bit like they were getting ready to fly down and suck our faces off…!

Helen’s friends were a great bunch and it was good to sing in the restaurant and connect with people who care…and, a big deal for Rosa, to actually be able to understand every word spoken. They were warm and interesting people…and they gave us a lift home.

I woke up early the next morning…and I felt really rubbish.

I was drowning a bit in the sadness and guilt, ‘we hadn’t tried hard enough’, ‘we should have got to Timor earlier’…’we blew it!’

Time to take myself for a walk again and to ring some people who might still be awake. For the feelings to be this overwhelming they had to be old ones from my childhood. The positive part of me was pointing out this was an opportunity to get the buggers up and out – really there was some perspective to be had here!

I went down to the beach – I reckoned seeing a crocodile would help me cheer up (or die quickly!!) and on the way I had some great conversations and phone message exchanges with people I love – being able to be honest about just how rubbish I was feeling blew it away way more quickly than if I’d been arguing with myself…telling myself what I already knew, that what I was feeling wasn’t rational, but ignoring my feelings isn’t the quickest way to get through them.

On my way back to the hostel I sat on a bench and did a back of the envelope calculation of our carbon footprint for the journey – having a look at what impact that flight really had made maths my new best friend!

The CO2 produced by one flight from London to Sydney is 3.5 tonnes per person (if you included the radiative forcing!)

…and for those of you who have never heard of ‘radiative forcing’ it’s ‘a measure of how the energy balance of the Earth–atmosphere system is influenced’ (still no clearer?! I’ve decided what it’s basically saying is that high up the impact is bigger) …most planes seem to fly at 35,000 to 40,000 feet and that means the impact is 1.89 times more according to Defra – (and 2.7 times more according to the centre for alternative technology in Machynlleth, Wales)

The Dili to Darwin flight produced 0.1 tonnes each – massive in comparison to the other 15,000 miles we’d travelled but small by comparison to the 3.5 tonnes to fly to Sydney from home. I did my best estimates of the rest of our journey (0.6 tonnes) and then looked at our normal footprint at home to see if it really would have been better to stay at home!

I got quite nerdy and started to let the flight go. We really had tried hard and our two cars consumed a lot – I reckoned by the end of my ROUGH calculations there was a chance this nine month journey to the other side of the world would end up producing slightly less CO2 than if we stayed at home…

I would have another look at it all with Theo and Rosa at some point but for now it was time to notice where we were.

When we’d stopped being in fear for our very lives the night before (from the bats) Rosa had asked me to reach for the place where we could celebrate arriving in Australia. Time to turn towards that…

Australia baby!!

I saved my big carbon reveal for a dull moment in the next 48 hours and instead started looking up how we were going to get from Adelaide to Sydney (…it is good getting up early – you can get so much done 🙂

There were no Greyhound buses leaving Adelaide. Our only option was to spend $255, catching a Firefly bus to Melbourne, and then a Greyhound from Melbourne to Sydney. We were looking at a journey of nearly 3,000 miles, which to put it into perspective, was the same distance as travelling from Castle Cary in Somerset to the end of Turkey. Time to look at the transfer websites my sister and friend Victoria had sent through.

… I literally opened the website, and there was a campervan that needed relocating from Adelaide to Sydney. All the fuel paid and four days to get there! I didn’t book it straight away, partly because it seemed too good to be true, but also because I have a British driving license and I wasn’t sure if that would be acceptable. I contacted the company and they weren’t open yet… By the time they were open the campervan had gone.

‘They go real fast… Mostly from the waiting list, you can join that if you want?’

I added us to the waiting list and looked at the next website – nothing from Adelaide to Sydney, but lots of relocation hire cars to Melbourne. We had to pay our own fuel but no car rental. That had to be better than spending 14 hours sitting in an Adelaide bus station and $255 travelling overnight to Melbourne!

If we travelled during the day, we could spend the night in Melbourne with Helen, or possibly my cousin Daisy – she would be heavily pregnant by this point and we would so love to see her…

I shared what I’d found, when Rosa and Theo finally woke up… Road trip! It would be so lovely to see some of The Great Ocean Road that Patrick and Jacqui had so wanted to take us along.

We got to the bus stop early ready for our first 24 hours travelling through Australia.

There were only Indigenous people on the bus apart from us, and none of us looked like we had much money. Clearly Greyhound to Alice Springs wasn’t a glamourous option. Luckily our driving team were great – two women who took regular breaks and took it in turns to rest and drive, so no immediate chance of death.

We were kicked off the bus for an hour or so at regular intervals (…including at 1.30 in the morning) and I finally discovered what ‘Bush’ is.

Endless (…endless!) miles of scrubby bushes and short Eucalyptus trees in sandy soil with termite mounds every few hundred yards.

How can there be so much of it…?

I was on the hunt for camels and kangaroos so the first few hours passed happily enough, we each had our own double seat because the bus wasn’t full and if you were very creative with where you put your legs and arms you could almost lie down!

It turns out sitting on a bus for 24 hours, followed straight away by a bus for another 24 hours, is a good way to forget about an hour’s flight from East Timor to Darwin.

We saw so many incredible birds, bright beautiful screechy birds, parrots – so many parrots!! I even saw two emus (which for some reason I thought were ostriches…?!)

We were beginning to feel what there was here. We had questions about the aftermath of ‘The Voice’ vote. I made efforts to connect with people on the bus and at the bus stop, with my best success coming when a little boy left his bag on the bus and I found it… his mum and sister smiled at me. What was going on? …Was it language, cultural difference, anger? The best I got from all my efforts was a brief smile and some one-word replies.

I like connecting and this was hard. Was there anything I could do differently…?! Might need to ask my sister who worked with Amnesty and would have more information on the impact the result of the vote has had for Indignous people.

We spent two hours in Alice Springs the next day, we had decided we couldn’t afford the $600 to go to Uluru – we were heading south.

My back was hurting by the beginning of the second journey and the wonderful driver, Ian, told us we were to let him know if we had any problems …when I did he made me a bed which made the second leg of the journey a whole load better than the first!

What we all agreed on was that Australia was more like America than America and that Australia was very big 🙂

We also agreed that if there was any way we could avoid spending a third night in a row on a bus we were going to take it.

I booked the transfer car from Adelaide to Melbourne and realised it was too late to text my cousin, tomorrow would have to do!

We arrived in Adelaide at 6.50 in the morning and we couldn’t get the car til 10.00 so we found a cafe and had a fab breakfast – we looked up the bus route to the airport and I set off – there was a chance they’d let us have the car early.

As I walked through the city that morning the romance of it all hit me…I am a mad cricket fan and I’ve listened to England being thrashed at the Adelaide Oval on Test Match Special every four years since I could remember – I was finally here myself, at the home of one of the most beautiful cricket grounds in the world – no time to go and look for myself but just being there felt precious…

Some wonderful women on the bus showed me where to go and I headed to the car rental place.

Steve was stressed – he’d clearly had a hell of a morning and me turning up an hour and a half early to collect my car was not what he needed…!

I used the time to text Daisy in Melbourne – she was so lovely – ‘yes of course you can stay’ ‘what do you want to eat!?’ (Pizza!) …we hadn’t seen each other for five years and her first baby is due in January, it couldn’t have been more perfect…

It was challenging driving the mega posh automatic hire car – my first driving in four months – I was grateful that Aussies drive on the same side of the road at least  …after I’d leapfrogged my way out of the car park (you only need one foot to drive an automatic – DO NOT try and use your left foot on the brake!) I picked up the family and we drove out of Adelaide (goodbye Adelaide Oval).

We were headed for the Great Ocean Road and in less than two days time we’d be in Sydney, finally with Ellie and Thoma (my sister and nephew), – with Mike, Lucy and Grace (my soon to be brother and nieces) and of course with Wilbur and Martha (my sisters wonderful crazy dogs!)