week twenty five | battambang, cambodia

When I was a little girl I always dreamt of being able to travel for work … and at age 22 I actually get to!   A couple of weeks ago, just one week before Christmas, Tom, Adam, Steve and I boarded our flights for our three working-day trip to Battambang Cambodia.

I have been to Cambodia a couple of times as a child, and while I had never been to Battambang itself the fact it was only about 3hrs from Bangkok meant I felt completely at home - and also a little silly for not arranging a pre or post-trip visit to my friends in Bangkok (next time guys!).

We were visiting Battambang to meet with one of Oaktree’s partners and to film for the upcoming Live Below The Line (LBL) campaign; my job (as the boys will happily point out) was really just logistics and supervision of the team as most of the heavy lifting had been done pre-departure.

We were actually only in Battambang town for three days, but were lucky enough to do quite a bit during our down-time, most of which consisted of naps in hammocks, catching up on some reading and drinking about a million watermelon shakes (which are my absolute favorite).

Battambang is Cambodia’s second biggest city, with a population of 4 million  people – although I don’t think you could tell that by being there because of the lack of hustle and bustle on the streets and also because of the absence of tall buildings.  The city itself is built along a wide river and like Bangkok, the cool weather at dusk brought everyone out of their homes ready to spend time with family and friends, walk in the gardens by the river, work out on the outdoor exercise equipment and join some kick ass public aerobics classes.

Cambodia is a beautiful place, filled with an incredibly sad history, but also with so much hope and promise for the future. Meeting the people who worked at our partner project was hugely inspirational and I could not be more thrilled with the work they are doing there.

Apart from work, we also ate lots of great food, made some lovely friends, ate some more great food, drank a few beers, ate a few fried crickets and cockroaches, lost a pub quiz, got massages and took a ride on the legendary “bamboo train”. Then we blinked and it was all over … just four days later we got back on a plane and headed home.

It was awesome.

TRIP RATING: 5/5 WATERMELON SHAKES

week twenty four | richmond, victoria

If you view life as one big adventure then it’s safe to say I adventure in Richmond quite a lot. My office is based right by Richmond train station and so many a happy lunch time is spent wondering along Swan Street searching out good food and hunting down the best cafes to work in when the office internet has cracked the shits. Richmond, unlike the north, is a very shiny place. Filled with lots of young beautiful people with high heels and good hair – not that the north lacks beauty but boy does it feel different. 

It’s actually a really nice part of town, with many excellent food options as well as some cute shops selling things you see in pintrest for far too much money.

On the other side, a little further from our HQ is a road called Bridge Road, still filled with café’s and bars but also filled with a strange assortment of clothing outlets and bridal shops. It’s all a little odd, and quite frankly with so many ‘For Lease’ signs everywhere at the moment it’s starting to feel more like a ghost town then I remember.

On good sunny days we try and take meetings outside, get some sun and fresh air. With so many gardens so close it’s easy to find a shady grassy spot to set up near the Richmond football team’s practice field and the MCG stadium. We also take a good number of strolls when talks need to be had outside office walls, many a good good life check in’s happen in the narrow streets filled with tiny homes and picket fences.

I love working in Richmond, it has a good feel to it and is perfectly situated close to my other job, the city, and my place - all the good things. I’m pretty lucky to spend a few mornings a week riding into work, grabbing a quick coffee from a friend and starting the day in the sunshine ready to get to work on projects I adore and work I believe in.

TRIP (AREA) RATING: 4/5 COFFEE MEETINGS

week twenty three | thornbury, victoria

It’s pretty hard to believe that I’ve lived in my little flat in Thornbury for two and a half years. It has been home and marked some of the best of times and some of the worst.

In the last couple of years Thornbury has also grown, from the daggy northern friend of trendy Northcote to the tiny pocket of excellence it is now. We’ve got far more cafes, bars, restaurants, shops, and general cuteness then ever before so I thought I would make mention of my 3 favorite Thornbury things – while not strictly an adventure for me, it could one day be for you.

1)   Jerry Joys café.

Just around the corner from my flat this is everyone’s go to café and you’ll find me here at least 3 mornings a week with a different assortment of my best friends drinking too much coffee and eating their fantastic food. It is also our go to stop for take away coffee when we have to drive somewhere very far very early. It is also my solid working café and has been the setting to many a uni essay or a planning morning.

2)   Rossmoyne Street.

This is my flat mate Clare’s top pick. Just three streets down from my home is a street from picture books with a committee of homeowners that do lots of fun ‘street event’ type things. Anything from street parties, street wide garage sales, street involved working bees, communal flower beds and veggie patch’s as well as the icing on the cake – the Rossmoyne street annual scarecrow competition, judged by Steve the mail man. It’s all charm, it’s all cuteness.

3)   Pender’s Park.

My ‘backyard’ of sorts - this little block of grass complete with a cute playground always covered in kids, a solid barbeque area and even a basketball hoop. Flat living is nothing new to me but it’s so nice to have this park so close by where we can eat dinner outside on warm evenings, read books on days off and generally see green on our rides home.

Thornbury is just adorable and I’m extremely lucky to have it as my home base for this time in my life as I muddle through the adventure that is life in our early 20’s.

TRIP (AREA) RATING: 5/5 HOME COMINGS

week twenty two | darwin, northern territory

There is something to really be said for reverse culture shock. Perhaps it’s unexpected nature, or the fact that after a trip that was filled with stress, overwhelming challenges, difficult cultural and lingual shifts and an overall lack of home comforts (and sleep) there is very little time to process what getting home might mean.

Post Timor-Leste all I could think about was getting back into the swing of things and getting down to some serious big picture development work from my familiar surroundings in inner Melbourne. However before that, we had to spend some time in an Australian city as foreign as the ones we’d encountered in Timor-Leste.

Darwin sits at the top of Australia, the distant capital sitting above the vast red desert heart of Australia.

I’ve done shamefully little travel around most of my lovely home country and so this between-flight stopover presented a perfect, if not tiny, opportunity for me to see what’s up in this end of the country.

We arrived late in the evening, the air just as muggy as when we left Australia but this time the sticky breeze proved a welcome change from the overwhelming dryness we had been in for the last three weeks. After stowing our packs we hopped into a cab and headed towards the famous Mindil Beach Markets. They were just awesome, with live music filling the air, people smiling and dancing. It felt good to be home, but I was also left with a real sense of needing to travel more within Australia as soon as possible. This feeling was probably also exasperated by the fact I was reading “Tracks” at the time, a fantastic book written by Robyn Davison about her journey across the western Australian desert.

After our wander, and food tour of the markets we decided to meander down to Darwin’s main strip. In the darkness Darwin seemed quiet and a lot like other Australian cities. The strip was small, just a series of bars and pubs, and very ‘boys-night-out’ as we had unfortunately picked state of origin night to have our walk.

If international travel gives you better insight into the world around you, then coming home surely provides a brief reflective period of self-discovery. Perhaps the most noticeable one for us three girls was that as much as sexism and gender was a hot topic for our work in Timor-Leste, the wolf whistles and disgusting things shouted our direction from those bars was a horrifying way to be welcomed home.

Overall the trip to Darwin was one I was happy happened, but equally as happy to have behind me, however I’m willing to believe that it was the shortest of trips and poor Darwin got a very tired and overwhelmed Matilda rather than a rested one, ready for anything.

I’d like to go back, I’d like to see it in the daylight and to make some less uncomfortable memories. Because from what I have heard, Darwin is a pretty lovely place.

2/5 HIPPY MARKET STALLS

week twenty one | cape paterson, vic

Oh holidays, how lovely you are. Now it might seem strange (considering this blog) but I don’t actually go on many holidays. I think it’s okay – I love the fact that more often than not, the trips I take are for work, and that I am able to have wonderful day trips to so many cool places – but boy oh boy did I need some time to do absolutely nothing, and Cape Paterson was the perfect place to do it in.

Cape Paterson is on the coast west of Melbourne, an area I have never visited before. It’s pretty quiet and seems much less touristy then the Great Ocean Road region to the east. I didn’t know what to expect, but the blue skies and road trip tunes set a nice vibe for the weekend ahead.

When this trip was in the early planning stages it was going to be a camping trip, however with just two days till we were due to leave, Max and I hadn’t figured out where we were going and work had more than gotten in the way of adventure planning. Lucky for us though a generous offer of a perfect little beach house meant we could take our time and not worry about much once we got there.

There is very little actually in Cape Paterson. It has a couple of shops/milk bar type things and that’s about it, but close enough to both Inverloch and Wonthaggi which we used as our food and ice-cream hubs.

Despite the perfect weather all that week the weekend became a little cold and so after a pretty chilly fish and chips on the beach we spent the rest of the evening by the fire, where I can happily report I kicked ass at monopoly. The next day was still too cold for swimming but just sunny enough for us to hit the coastal road for some exploring. The road had little turn offs and paths down to beaches and lookouts so we had a great time hunting for non-existent caves, sitting on white sandy beaches and watching birds majestically land on eagles nest rock – a massive rock formation jutting up from the ocean off the coast. 

The weekend over all was a happy blur of sunny walks, red wine by the fire, car sing-along’s, good chats, lots of laughs and a couple of cute pictures – and I wouldn’t have had had it any other way.

TRIP RATING: 5/5 FIRE SIDE GLASSES OF RED

 

week twenty | warburton, vic

Melbourne cup day really sprung up on me out of nowhere this year and so I was pretty happy to invite myself along to a country hike that my wonderful friends Clare and Kym had planned. We set off in the early afternoon with the hopes of a small hike and some fresh air. Lucky for us the mountains are always closer than expected and we arrive in fresh, tiny, perfect, Warburton at around three and were off our short hike to the top of the falls. These waterfalls almost mark the start of what later becomes the Yarra, the huge river that snakes through the middle of Melbourne. I love being out of the city sometimes and it was the perfect way to escape the race that not only stops the nation but sadly the lives of a couple of beautiful horses this year.

The hike was lovely, not to long, quite busy (probably because of the public holiday) and it was a great day for it. Not too hot with a slight breeze coming through the palm trees. It’s all uphill, and I, as always, lamented at my fitness levels but god it was lovely. To top of the beauty of our surrounds was the fact that the three of us were just thrilled to be (FINALLY) on a hike club adventure, a concept that had been developed earlier this year and was part of the process of starting up this blog. 

Once we had finished our hike we headed into town for post hike fresh juice and then Kym took us to a very cool hidden forest that I wont write much about due to it’s top secret location and also because that means it will hopefully get it’s own post soon when I finally get back there.

It was a great day. It was great that hike club truly became a thing, it was great that I could spend some much needed time with Kym and Clare, and it was great that we could get out of town for a bit on a day I don’t overly enjoy. However one of the very greatest things about this trip was that as we were driving back through town on our way home it dawned on me that I had visited Wurburton one time before, over a year ago, on one of the greatest roadtrips of my life with my big sis Carter. What has become an almost legendary tale of our ten hour drive from Melbourne to Canberra is now much more readable on a map – and who knows, maybe one day Carter and I will be back and we can go on a hike and enjoy it as much as Kym, Clare and I did.

5/5 REALLY TALL TREES

week nineteen | atauro island, timor-leste

Part three: Atauro Island 

For those of you that read my blog or interact with me in the real world you might know I have the tendency to declare pretty much anything as ‘the best thing ever.’ This is purely a reflection of my positive and cheery nature rather then everything really being ‘the best thing ever’ because only one thing can be the best, and that thing is Atauro Island.

Paradise on earth and two hours by boat from Dili Atauro stole my heart from the very second we saw it clearly from our boat. It’s as dry as the rest of Timor but scattered with trees and houses along its crystal clear shoreline. Atuaro is today what I imagine islands off Thailand’s main land where back in the 70’s - untouched gems that very few people know anything about.  There is power for only 4 hours every evening but for the most part you don’t notice it, it’s calm, friendly and perfect.

We were lucky enough to stay at staff accommodation with our partner where we were presented seaside views; morning and afternoon swims and fresh coconuts cut right off the tree in the yard. There is just one place that you could stay as a tourist called Barry’s place which is a all inclusive eco resort on the island. It’s stunning and for anyone on the hunt for romantic getaways I couldn’t think of anything better.

Atauro is also a old colonial Portuguese port and so a stroll through the old town presents views of lovely old buildings, churches and houses built with big rap around balconies, evoking images of ladies sipping cool drinks and watching the sun set over the water.

Our stay on the island marked the last couple of days of our work trip, and so we headed to the beach on our last evening to have a chat about the impact of the trip both in a professional sense but also for us personally. By this time it felt like I had been in Timor-Leste a lifetime and I had learnt more then I could possibly have thought would be possible. This place will hold really precious memories for me and I’ll hopefully be back for years to come.

TRIP RATING: 5/5 FRESH COCONUTS