In the beginning of 2017 we left Germany to start our amazing journey of cycling in New Zealand and Australia. We knew it would be a special experience and we wanted it to be not as planned and as predictable as a normal holiday.
We had an easy start in New Zealand, just because it was not that different temperature-wise and we still had the feeling of a long holiday of three months. Australia was the next step in terms of our degree of freedom. We had a one year working holiday visa and our challenges were the heat and the long distances here. After the first weeks on the East Coast we arrived on the cattle station in Queensland just as planned.
Here it was the first time we really changed not only our plans but our mindset as well. We confronted ourselves with the multitude of options we could choose to take. Especially I realized how much I liked this kind of traveling. The feeling of getting homesick which I had expected to appear at some point did not come up and I do not see it coming up soon either (sorry parents). Leaving the cattle station with a car instead of on our bikes was the first time of us putting the enjoyment of our adventure over cycling everything.
Our new approach was enjoying our time and the moment we are in. We drove the car to Darwin because it was an easy way to get there in order not to arrive there too late in the season before it gets even hotter. While cycling down the West Coast we organized a couple of lifts in order to avoid cycling against the strong head wind. We made our way down to Perth and from there we had planned to leave Australia after our parents' visit over Christmas. At some point we started wondering whether we really wanted to stick to that plan while having more than three months of visa left. We met so many people along the way who said Tasmania is an amazing place for cycling for example. We decided not to leave yet but use the time to explore the Australian South and Tasmania.
One of my key learnings is to actually use the freedom we have over sticking to a plan we made at some point. This is not a holiday, this is our life. Furthermore there were so many more realizations which I would have never expected. The trigger for most of those learnings is the people we meet along our way. 50% of our experience is visiting places while the other 50% are the interactions we have with people. We met so many people either on the road giving us water, via WarmShowers or Couch Surfing, on campsites and just famers along our way that we asked if we can pitch a tent. So many different people, lifestyles and stories we saw and heard about. This definitely opened my eyes in a way that we are more open for alternative lifestyles and approaches on how to live your life in general.
The upcoming year is going to be totally different from what we had in 2017 and I am really excited what the year will bring. Leaving Australia in April means leaving the English-speaking countries and cycling home from South East Asia includes an even longer time frame than one year Australia.

Enjoy our special best of 2017, I just love it. We will keep on cycling and will see where we end up.
See you around,
Ronnie :)