Student finds traveling to be invaluable experience

On a bright and sunny day right after our graduation in 2008, my friend and I were talking about our futures. We wanted to experience as much as possible before life got too serious. We wanted to travel the world, see places we never thought we would be able to see, eat food we never imagined that people would eat and meet all kinds of different people. We both agreed that now was the time to do it, and we agreed to work hard to make it happen.

We sat down and decided that we had to pick out a part of the world that we wanted to focus on. We each picked out 15 countries, and compared our lists. Most of the countries were in Asia, but the lists also included Australia and New Zealand. We decided to contact a travel agency to see if it was possible to make our dreams come true. After talking to them, we booked our tickets and started working. We worked almost every day, even on the weekends, and we barely spent any money. It was all worth it, though, when we got up bright and early on Jan. 8, 2009 to go to the airport.

Our first stop was New Delhi, India. We got there late at night and went straight to bed, not before fearing for our lives after being told that passengers were not allowed to wear seatbelts in the cars, and having someone comment on our very blonde hair and how freakishly tall they thought I was. About 24 hours later, we were both sick with food poisoning. You would think that would be a bad start to our trip, but looking back at it, we do not really think of it as horrible – it was just a part of the experience.

After staying in India for a couple of weeks, we traveled to Thailand. We met a group of people that were going to be traveling with us for about a month and a half. They were people from all over the world: Australia, Sweden, England, New Zealand, South Africa and so on. We travelled from Thailand to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, before we returned to Thailand. It was really different having to be with a group of strangers for 45 days, but we had a lot of fun and experienced amazing things, such as swimming in waterfalls, tubing down a river in Luang Prabang, staying with families at home stays, and going to cooking classes to learn how to cook real Thai food. We also got to eat tarantellas and sleep right next to a bunch of mooing cows.

As we left the group in Chiang Mai, Thailand, we kept on travelling with one of the British girls. We took a night train down to Bangkok and went on to the southern parts of Thailand, such as the Phi Phi islands. We flew to Kuala Lumpur and saw the (at the time) tallest buildings in the world; the Petronas towers.

We were happy to finally be able to do some real shopping when we got to Singapore: the Asian country in which you are not allowed to chew gum. We met my friend's family in Singapore and stayed with them at a very fancy hotel and we celebrated her cousin's wedding. It was nice to stay in an actual hotel room without having to worry about bed bugs and having to share a room with complete strangers. After the wedding, the entire wedding party traveled to Bintan, an Indonesian Island right outside of Singapore. We spent the days by the pool and the evenings at beachside restaurants.

It was a huge change to go back to staying in hostels, but, in a way, it was also kind of nice. We flew from Singapore to Hong Kong, a place where we had a really hard time finding anything to eat. We ended up having KFC several times and the days were spent doing sightseeing, shopping and going to a new movie every night.

After about four days in Hong Kong, followed by a 12-hour plane ride, we arrived in New Zealand. We got to see the 90-mile-long beach, we tried sand boarding down a fairly steep hill, and we definitely saw a lot of sheep since New Zealand is said to have about 12 sheep per citizen. We loved being there and wished that we could have spent more time there, but we knew that the best was probably yet to come: Australia.

We got to Melbourne during Easter. That meant that pretty much everything was closed, so the days were spent walking around, hanging out at coffee shops, going to movies and doing some window-shopping. We flew to Sydney after a few days I personally did not enjoy it when the flight attendant announced that it was going to be a rollercoaster landing into Sydney, but as soon as I saw the Opera House I stopped worrying and started to get very excited.