ABSTRACT
It’s hard to know who I’d be without travel. It has come to pervade my life. Not a day seems to pass that I don’t think about it, reflect upon it, read about it, write about it, talk about it or ‘see’ it. It is an interesting irony, then, that my interest in travel is so great that I now spend more time thinking and writing about it than physically ‘doing it’. I wasn’t always so captivated by travel, however. There was a time when I had no interest in it at all – well, at least, not in ‘performing’ it. This began to change in 2002 when I found myself studying tourism, with no real ambition, at the University of Western Sydney. I had only gained access to university through an early admissions programme that didn’t consider final examination results; this place ended up being my only option as, after losing interest in my final year of secondary school, I didn’t have the marks to apply for anything else through the regular entrance pathways. I deferred university in the hope that I could forge a career that wouldn’t require further study. After several months of unemployment, I spent the remainder of my travel-less gap-year working in the medical records room of a Sydney hospital.
