From Deserts to Rainforests

I was 21 years old when I first deployed with the Air Force. I had spent almost the last 3 years traveling around the United States, Canada, and countries all over Europe. In my experience, the battle between normalcy and worldly adventures isn’t talked about enough. At the end of the day you still have to come back to somewhere you can be proud to be yourself and keep building up both sides of the person you’ve become. I believe that it’s important to be as equally as interested in a person having dinner with family or close friends as you are when you’re in a place where you’re the one with the accent. During my first deployment, I was seeing and accomplishing amazing missions, but in the back of my head, I was lacking in that balance department. I was across the world and couldn’t think of a real reason why I was looking forward to going home, or what was there was even worth it.  After talking about this to my good friend Jim after a late night gym session, I found the answer. Now granted, Jim was a former special ops guy and had lived a lot of life, but I really did love his outlook on life. He brought to light something that I had half thoughts of, but had never come to a conclusion on my own: your happiness is not based on your geographical location. You really have to find yourself and find what you have to do and who you have to become that will allow you to thrive. That still didn’t stop me from booking a ticket to Australia.

The original plan was that Jim was going to accompany me and show me around the country, yet due to a family emergency that happened the night before we were supposed to depart, I had to go it alone. In hindsight, that really was my saving grace. This is going to be a common theme throughout this blog series, but I had a general idea of where I wanted to go, but I was going to rely on intuition and the goal of exploration to guide me. I had a friend of a friend from my Air Force technical school in Sydney, a foreign exchange student friend in Melbourne, and a love for Tas, the Tasmanian devil, who were my only points of contact. 

The town just south of Sydney called Wollongong was where I first went with my brand new camera and sat on the beach for hours fiddling with and figuring out how the damn thing worked. It turns out that there’s some science to photography that you just have to get out and do that isn’t in the endless resource of YouTube videos.  It was through the lens of that camera down in Wollongong where I discovered that I could capture a frame that would allow me to show the people in my life. I took that feeling and ran with it. 

This really came into play when I bought a ticket to Tasmania.. a place I really knew nothing about except that not a lot of people get the chance to go there, and they had beaches. I love a good beach. What I didn’t realize about Tasmania is that they drove on the other side of the road, had huge mountains, and an endless stream of sights to see that still fill my mind's eye with awe and disbelief.  I was supposed to be there for 4 days, and ended up staying for 5. Between the multitude of biomes, the people, beer, and history, I had a lot of trouble leaving. 

I was driving south from Launceston into the mountains with the windows down listening to AJR when I began to ponder on the fact that “where I am doesn’t determine my happiness.”  I mean it certainly helps when all you have on your docket that day is to get to somewhere that’s 5 hours away by sunset and a physical map with endless possibilities, but that’s not the point. Photography really does allow someone to take a fast pace day or life and slow down to capture the beauty around them. I will also take this moment to hammer on the fact that having to rely on a paper map and not on a GPS guiding you opens up a whole new level of excitement. In life, we rarely know exactly where we are going to next, and that deviations and detours are commonplace. Is it such a bad thing when the roads we are driving are the same way?

I’ve found that an openness to experiencing a new environment with a smile opens all kinds of doors.  In my experience that mindset is more prevalent in people living outside of the United States, which is why I think I’m drawn towards those adventures so much more. I remember getting out at a rest stop to stretch my legs, and within 10 minutes I had two invitations to strangers’ BBQs and the location for a wildlife reserve where they had Tasmanian devils. Being that my main goal was to finally see a Tasmanian devil in person, I opted for the goal becoming the main one for the day. 

Look I’m going to tell it straight, if you ever, and I mean EVER get the chance to hold or see a wombat in person, take it with all the vigor you have in your body. If the US had native wombats, I feel like it’d be a much better place.  

After the wombats and Tasmanian devils (who absolutely lived up to the hype) I got lost for a good 30 minutes down the wrong road, and it led me to one of the most beautiful and impressive stretches of road I have ever had the pleasure of taking. I must have gotten out of my car at least 20 minutes to take pictures. Living in Colorado now, I can tell you that arid/high sierra mountains have a MUCH different sensation to that of mountains covered in tropical plants, birds and animals. Now I know what you’re thinking, “yeah Andy no shit,” but how was I supposed to know that until I experienced it?  

That road made me really reflect on the fact that a month prior I was in the desert flying into (for the purposes of this blog) unnamed airfields in ungodly heat, and how now I finally felt like I was in a place where I belonged. For years, I attributed that sensation to me being in a new place in the world where it was just me and exploring, but I can now confidently say that it was due to the fact I was doing what I wanted to do, and through my new love of photography and the exploring I was doing on a daily basis, I was starting to become and was actively thinking about who I wanted to become as a man. 

I eventually went on to book a one way ticket to Brisbane, saw almost all of the east coast of Australia, and even missed my first flight home, which extended my whole trip by a week which I spent in Sydney, living like a local with my friend Michael, who I still talk to today.  And since I believed in myself enough to buy that first camera and bring it with me, not even knowing if I’d step up to the plate to learn the skills necessary to capture what I was experiencing, I am now able to sit down and look on my computer over 8 years later and reflect on how important that trip was to becoming the person I am today. I’m not saying that I’m an amazing person who has everything figured out, but I know that I can handle most of what comes my way, whether it’s across the world or in the town that I now live in. 

Getting out and paying mind to what’s around you is what will set you apart from other people in your life. Traveling solo internationally forces one to constantly be aware, but if that skill can be continually applied throughout life, the next time you have to find yourself, I have a feeling that the true you won’t be as far away as you might think.