If you’ve read our travel plans, you would have noticed that there was no mention of our going to Australia. Instead we were supposed to head to South America after leaving Southeast Asia, for our last major stop of the Big Trip. Well then why is the Australian flag flying in our “Currently In” box?

A Twist of Fate

A while back, while waiting for Val to finish up writing some emails in an internet cafe, I stumbled upon a contest. To qualify, you had to be willing to blog about your trip to Australia several times a week, as well as produce at least one video or podcast. Since this is pretty much what we’d been doing and planned on doing for months and months, I went for it.

And then one day while checking email in Calcutta, I got a response back. We had been selected as World Nomads Ambassadors. The deal is we get a free, tricked out van that we are allowed to drive all over Australia. In our case we’ll be heading from Sydney to Darwin over the course of about seven weeks. It’s an epic journey, and will surely go down as one of the most memorable of the Big Trip.

So what about South America then? Well, when you get offered a blogging-for-free-van gig in Australia, you take it. And it’s not like we could cover the whole world during one trip. Got to leave some stuff for later on, anyways.

The Plan v2.0

The new plan is to pick up the van in Sydney on June 7th. We have an appointment for a one week trek around Uluru, or Ayers Rock, about midway through our trip. That’s also part of our World Nomads gig (THANK YOU WORLD NOMADS! - had to be said), and we’ll be putting a video of our experiences together. After that, we’ve got about another 3 and a half weeks or so to get the van to the drop-off point in Darwin.

For budget flight purposes, we actually flew into Darwin, where I am writing this. It’s tropical and laid back, and we saw one of the most amazing sunsets to date on the Esplanade. So strangely we’re flying to Sydney to drive back to Darwin. But it’ll be a hell of a journey, so it’s worth it.

We’ll be blogging about our adventures on our World Nomads blog, as well as BTB, so feel free to check in at either location. Over the next couple of days we’ll be getting caught up with our Burma and Singapore posts before starting our official-sounding tenure as World Nomads Ambassadors.