As I’m just about to head to Kokoda, I thought I would talk about my travel history and the preparation for what will most likely turn out to be, the trek of my life.
Growing up in Darwin, meant that much of my international travel in my younger days tended to be in Asia. It was cheap and close. Bali, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Singapore, Guanzhou Province in China, Macau, Phuket and Bangkok just to name a few. It has only been in the last ten years that I’ve ventured a bit further to the USA and places like Hawaii, LA, Mexico and NYC.
I would live in New York in a heartbeat. I’ve been twice now and fell in love the minute I landed there. After spending 3 weeks there on my last visit with my daughter Renee and her partner Dave, the love grew stronger. Our first white Christmas certainly didn’t disappoint, with 14 inches of snow dumped on the city during a winter storm, Central Park was transformed into an absolutely magical place. Not to mention a very authentic Italian/American Christmas Eve spent in New Jersey (yes, the home of Bruce Springsteen) with the wonderfully hospitable Ferraris family. Seven courses of seafood later and we rolled back to NYC on the subway! There’s so much I could tell you about NYC, and I might do that another time.
It wasn’t until 2011, that I had my first taste of adventure trekking! It all started with a fundraising challenge to walk the Great Wall of China for the Westpac Rescue Helicopter Service. The challenge was, to raise money for the service ($3,000) plus the option to fundraise your own travel expenses (about $3,500). I’ll talk more about fundraising in another post, but I ended up raising about $14,500.00 in total. Clearly I enjoyed the fundraising part, but the trek along the Great Wall was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. To travel to a foreign country, with a bunch of strangers, push your physical and mental boundaries along the way and to come back home the best of mates is an experience of a lifetime.
And I am about to do it all again. This time it’s Kokoda. Watch this space.
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Faithfull Living 