23 Attempts at Love

Chapter 13: The Mini-Gap, Part 1

I had just over two months between graduation and moving to London, so I jumped on the "mini-gap" trend and booked myself a two-month trip away: one month in Australia, another month in South Africa. Some of my friends from school had done the proper gap year before starting university and I was always a little jealous whenever I heard their travel stories, and all the amazing things they'd seen. By my thinking, I could spend two months in the sunshine roaming around two amazing countries, and then be back to real life to move to London and start my life in the real world.

Part 1 begins at Heathrow Airport with my Mum in tears at the departure gate.

"I'll text you every day," I told her. "It'll be just like I'm at uni except with nicer pictures." She nodded, still sobbing. Half of the enormous suitcase I'd packed was stuffed with the emergency supplies she'd given me: a first-aid kit, bandages, enough sun-cream to fill a pool, various hats for various occasions, bite cream, insect spray, padlocks for locking my suitcase and anything else she could think an overly-cautious and mildly paranoid traveller might need. I knew as soon as I landed in Australia that I'd be dumping most of it in the first hostel to avoid lugging the extra weight around with me.

The first flight took me to Abu Dhabi, where I waited for three hours for a connection flight to take me to Sydney. From there I caught a taxi and went to the hotel I'd booked for the first two nights: I'd arrived at 2am, had almost no sleep for the past 24 hours of travelling and suddenly regretted ever bothering to travel to Sydney because I knew it was going to be awful travelling back. I threw up in the hotel toilet from exhaustion and then collapsed on the bed: a stinking, sweaty mess with no idea what on earth she was doing on the other side of the world.

Sydney was a chaotic mess of beautiful food and beautiful people. I could walk along the coastal route and spend hours on the beaches, then walk into the heart of Sydney and feel like I was in the middle of London. I was spending a few days in Sydney before flying to Melbourne, Brisbane, Fraser Island and then up to Cairns, where I'd catch a flight to South Africa. I had a thick folder with copies of all of my tickets, planned excursions and hostel bookings, and my parents had an exact copy of this with a full itinerary of my travels. Dad had threatened to start calling the hostels and tour providers if I didn't check in with them often enough, which was enough of a threat to keep them in the loop. Still, it was as much freedom as I'd ever felt.

Within two days I was sunburned – badly – from falling asleep on Bondi beach, listening to the sound of the waves and people-watching. I was woken up by a lifeguard who'd spotted my nap and my reddening skin. I blamed it on the jetlag: in my head it was the middle of the night in England and somehow, instead, I was on Bondi beach. The first week felt like a dream.

I moved out of the hotel after a couple of days and into a hostel: I'd treated myself to a hotel only to get rid of the jetlag, but from now on I was determined to treat this like a proper gap year, and not to spend all of my savings in one go. I still had to move to London, after all.

Then, down to Melbourne, where I discovered just how good food could really be. I landed in another hostel and made friends with two Australian sisters who were visiting Melbourne from Perth. They were as new to the city as I was, and invited me on a food tour they'd booked onto.

I spent an evening with the sisters – Emma and Ella (they joked their parents hadn't been too creative) – drinking wine and hopping from place to place in Melbourne: an Asian-fusion restaurant where they served chicken dumplings in chilli oil and red wine from the local vineyard, a Japanese restaurant so well hidden I wouldn't ever find it again, where I tried sake (for the first and last time), Japanese beer, crispy fried pork and miso soup. Then, onto an Italian deli to try sweet dessert wine and tiramisu, prepared by an elderly Italian couple who sang while they worked and passed out dishes from the kitchen to the waiters as though the waiters had come for dinner at their own house.