I’m back!  It’s been a busy couple of weeks.

So here’s my plan for next year.  After my trips to South America I decided it was about time to finally learn Spanish.  So I’m planning to move in January to Buenos Aires.  I’d like to spend 4-5 months learning in a full-time school, and there are lots of them available.  Most are private schools, but I’m most interested in the Espanol para Extranjeros (Spanish for Foreigners) program at the Universidad de Buenos Aires.  (I also need to learn how to type accented letters!)

The UBA program only accepts in-person registrations so I’m going to have to just show up and see if there’s any space left.  Another odd thing about the university program is that it has 4 month-long courses, but they’re run in January, February, June, and July.  So there’s a weird gap there.  After the first two months I’ll have to decide if I want to travel and return, switch to a private school, or something else I haven’t considered yet.

After that I’m going to backpack through South America for as long as my money and interest last.  I’m guessing I’ll return by the holidays and spend Thanksgiving and Christmas in Ann Arbor.  And finally, I’d like to then look for work in Australia…what an end to a great plan!

Of course everyone is welcome to visit me.  Family, friend, acquaintance, whatever.  Just figure out a way to get to where I am and I’ll show you around.  I have a few suggestions on how to afford a trip too, so keep your eyes out here for that.

In Part 1 I talked about my first trip to Australia all the way back in 2003 and the process of getting my visa.  I returned to Australia just a few weeks ago for a vacation, which was necessary to meet my visa’s “first entry” deadline.  That left a 6 year gap between trips, but even though I hadn’t been to Oz in a while I was still able to get abroad most years.  In 2007 I visited Peru and Bolivia for about 3 weeks.  In 2008 I went to Ecuador for a week.

Somehow I can’t even remember what made me originally decide to go to Peru.  If I had to guess, I was probably looking for a good deal to use the frequent flyer miles I had accumulated during my Thanksgiving and Christmas travel between Austin and Ann Arbor.  While planning prior to the Peru trip I wanted to see some of the more rural areas of the country and I decided I would head straight to Iquitos and explore the jungle and Amazon river areas.  Iquitos has a population of over a million people but it is so isolated that the only means of access are planes and Amazon river boats — No roads!

Machu Picchu

This brings me to my first rule of travel:  It’s no use planning an itinerary because I’ll just end up ignoring it.  I arrived in Lima and it became clear to me that my non-existent Spanish and the Peruvian people’s non-existent English was a bit more of a barrier than I thought.  Other than a family trip to France when I was 15 I’d never visited a country that spoke a foreign language (no comments about Texas, y’all).  So I decided to stay on the tourist trail and headed for Cusco to see Machu Picchu, and on to Lake Titicaca.  It turned out to be a great trip and I learned how a couple dozen words and some patience are all you need to get by when you don’t speak the local language.

The trip to Ecuador was really short…my only chance to get away in 2008 after my vacation days got cashed out from being laid off by AMD.  I just wandered around Quito a bit and then headed to a small town called Tena, located in the Amazon rainforest.  I took a fantastic day long rafting trip, with really intense rapids.

View of Quito

What I really like about South America is how informal everything is there.  Getting around is really easy, every town has a bus terminal with dozens of bus companies running buses to anywhere people want to go.  In most places you can just show up, and within an hour or two there will be a bus going just about anywhere you need.  Within the cities informal colectivos (shared vans) will run along any route they can find.  Once the van is full, it goes.  Of course you might have to wait for a while.  Street vendors selling tasty food show up anywhere there’s a crowd.  It’s nice, you hardly have to plan anything.

Next time: What’s next for me.  I’ve got a rough plan for the next year or so and it means going all over the place…

Having always liked to travel, I thought it seemed like it would be a lot of fun to live for a while in another country.  Even countries most similar the United States still have different foods, different sports, different politics, different slang, any lots of other differences.

In 2003 my dad and I had looked into doing a rock climbing trip at Devils Tower with some friends of our family.  We went to the rock gym in Ann Arbor a couple times a week to learn to climb.  I was already overdue to graduate from U of M and had finally decided to finish as quickly as possible.  I needed a couple of full semesters plus a half semester of work to finish.  I decided it made more sense to do the half semester during the summer so I would graduate another 4-5 months early.  But by the time I was certain of the start and end dates for the classes, the climbing trip was full and I wasn’t able to go.

Sydney Opera House

It was frustrating because I was looking forward to it and as it happened my break between semesters perfectly matched the dates of the trip.  It would have been a real adventure and that was the biggest appeal for me.  I decided I could still have a pretty good adventure and started looking for somewhere exotic to go.  As luck would have it, I had recently finished an 8-month internship at AMD which allowed me to save enough to cover my housing expenses for the rest of my undergrad degree with enough leftover for a nice vacation.  Two weeks backpacking in Australia seemed like the perfect trip.  I could name a dozen places that seem much more exotic now, but at the time Australia had perfectly captured my imagination.

So off I went and had a great time seeing cosmopolitan Sydney, hiking Darwin’s Walk in the Blue Mountains, spending 3 days SCUBA diving on the Great Barrier Reef, living in stilted tents among cassowaries in the Daintree Rainforest, and getting my first taste of hostel life and backpacker travel.  I loved the relaxed friendly vibe of life in Australia, the moderate climate in the south and tropical climate in the north, that some of the nearest countries were interesting places like Indonesia and Fiji, and the ethnically diverse population.

The Three Sisters - Blue Mountains, New South Wales

At the end of my trip it took almost 45 hours for me to get from Crocodylus Village in the rainforest of Queensland back to Ann Arbor, so I had plenty of time to think.  I had just submitted grad school applications and though I hadn’t received any responses I knew I would get in somewhere and that would consume the next couple of years.  But I wondered if I could get a job down under once I graduated.  After doing lots of research I thought it would be pretty hard to find a job there from the US.  What’s the incentive to hire a new grad from halfway around the world?  How would I even do an interview?  So I set my sights on a general migration visa — essentially the Australian equivalent of a green card.

View from a ProDive liveaboard - Great Barrier Reef, Queensland

Australia has a major shortage of skilled workers and has one of the easier migration programs in the developed world. Their skilled migrant visas are available for a huge range of occupations from bakers to plumbers to engineers, although the qualifications are different for each of them.  In general trade-based occupations require several years of experience in the trade, whereas with professions that need specific degrees you’re eligible with only the degree or with the degree and a very brief period of experience.  Most computer and electronics degrees required either the degree only or the degree plus 1 year of experience.  Unfortunately for me my field was an outlier and I needed 4 years of experience.  So I had to wait until 2008 before I could be considered.  From there the process involved gathering lots of paperwork, paying lots of money, and lots and lots of waiting.

A Parrot at Crocodylus Village - Daintree Rainforest, Queensland

My application actually moved quickly, and in mid-2009 roughly a year after I began the process it was approved.  I could hardly believe it, after all that time I finally had it!  Talk about a long term goal, it took almost as long as college.  But despite the fact that I was good to go now, I still had a bit more I wanted to do…

Next time….Part 2: South America