Epilogue: 18 hours in Dubai

I somewhat adventurously planned an 18 hour stopover in Dubai on the way home. There’s a brand new zoo on its way here. In true Dubai fashion it might just be the most expensive-to-build new zoo the world has ever seen, and I wanted to see it. And in true Dubai fashion, it didn’t get built on schedule, and won’t open now for another couple of months. 

Never mind, I thought. The Swans are coming home like a steam train – no, better, coming home like a high-speed TGV – and if I’m going to be at the MCG barely 12 hours after getting off a plane I should probably try to sleep along the way. So I booked a hotel room, just in case. The TGV derailed (I still don’t want to talk about it), but here I am, in the hotel anyway, trying and failing to pre-empt jet lag. I get into Melbourne at who-knows-what-time. Hopefully my girlfriend wakes me up for the start of the footy. And at quarter-time. And half-time. She’ll give up in the second half, but maybe she’ll wake me up again on Monday.

These 18 hours of limbo between being in Europe and being home have been fortunate, though. Managing diabetes when crossing nine time zones is more art than science, because you have to figure out how long to delay your usual 16 hour ‘long-acting’ insulin dose, so you can get back into a proper cycle. I didn’t do a very good job this time: my blood sugar spiked massively, and I spent the entire flight awake, taking insulin and drinking heaps of water: doing this all the way to Melbourne after another quick connection would have been tough. 

I had to confide in the flight attendants that ketones were at moderately worrying levels so they’d give me an entire bottle, and one of them had a boyfriend with diabetes. It was helpful that she understood the situation, but I got pretty tired of her or another staff member coming past every 10 minutes to check on me and offer a meal, if I needed it, or more water, or to see if I wanted to radio ahead to Dubai and have a doctor on hand? I’ve been doing this for 18 years, guys. I’m on it.

And these 18 hours have been good for another reason too, serving as a bridge between one life and the next, and allowing me to at least partly separate out my sadness at leaving Europe from my joy at going home.  I’m not going to lie: it was a very confusing, alienating mess of emotions back in Dublin, and getting on the bus to Dublin Airport wasn’t easy. After 15 years of dreaming, three years of planning and six a bit months of doing, the dream trip is over.

(I keep re-reading that last sentence, wondering if there’s some way of re-writing it that changes the meaning, reverses the fact, upends the laws of space and time and lets me go back to the start again.)

For the first hundred days, when there were more places left to come than places that were gone, it felt like it would last forever. Then there was a patch – roughly, from Nuremberg to Amsterdam – where it at least sometimes felt like it was all too long. I was still enjoying a lot of things, but a level of fatigue had set in that was impossible to shake and was inevitably affecting my mood. Then I got to the UK, and while my energy level didn’t rebound I enjoyed London and Edinburgh so much that the joy of travelling returned. Just in time to be sad that it’s all finished.

Have I made the most of it? I… don’t know, but I hope so and I think so. There are certainly things I’d change, and there were some bits that I didn’t enjoy. But I was gone for 28 weeks: it would have been unreasonable to expect everything to be perfect. I certainly packed more into the first half than the second, and some times I was so slow to get moving in the last couple of months that I caught myself getting angry at myself for wasting time. I wasn’t, though. I was doing as much as my energy reserves allowed. I’m pretty sure that I’ll remember all the things I did, not the things I didn’t.

And to be honest, I reckon I got pretty good at it. There were no calamities. There were headaches to solve, but they got solved. I didn’t get mugged, arrested or worse. I didn’t lose my wallet, my phone, my passport or my insulin. Well. I didn’t lose my insulin much. Backpacking for six months with insulin supplies is a logistical nightmare, but I made it work, somehow. This isn’t an Oscars speech, but I will use this moment to thank my sister, who was on call as my emergency contact since March. I nominated Julia to be the one to bring bad news to mum and dad and Alice, if it came to that, and I’m incredibly grateful that it didn’t, but that she didn’t flinch either.

I’m daring to be a little bit proud of this blog. I still intend to write those last two pieces for the UK and Ireland, by the way, as weird as it is to publish an epilogue before some of the chapters, and to finish it will be a big deal . I think it’s worth writing this one while the thoughts are still fresh, even if it ends up being out of order. And it’s keeping me semi-awake until I get on my flight. And while I’m turning this post into an Oscars speech, I owe a debt of gratitude to my cousin Ron, who came to the rescue when it turned out I used a blogging platform that hated my iPad, and has been collating and uploading each post. This blog wouldn’t be 90% complete without him.

Anyway, back to Dublin (oh, could we? Perhaps I could retrace the route in reverse this time!). I didn’t want to leave Europe. I’m going to miss being able to walk onto a train, and then disembark two or three hours later in another country. The differences between the two were rarely profound – there is a pan-European culture, whether Vladimir Putin and Nigel Farage like it or not – but they were always enough to fire my curiosity, even if it were just walking through a supermarket and looking for weird things I don’t know how people can bring themselves to eat. I will feel Australia’s isolation from the rest of the world like never before.

I’m going to miss walkable cities. Melbourne keeps winning that World’s Most Liveable City thing, and it’s a load of bullshit. Sure, if you are lucky enough to live close to the CBD, or at least inside the tram network, Melbourne’s pretty great. I’ve been that lucky before I went away and I’m hoping, without much confidence, I’ll be that lucky again now. But because I don’t drive, if not I’ll be spending as long waiting for and cramming onto trains to go to work as it would take me to walk from the edges of, say, Edinburgh into the city centre. The stupid ‘great Australian dream’ has a lot to answer for. We don’t all need backyards: an entire continent of people are doing without them just fine. 

Practicalities aside, I’m going to miss the freedom to decide what I do with a day, knowing that it won’t, under any circumstances, involve going to work. Some days I used to pile mishap upon adventure upon curiosity. Some days I didn’t get out of bed until 11, or leave the hostel until four. Thank unions for flex-time in the public service: even rocking up to work at 10AM on Monday week feels like an impossible ask, and not only because I’m in denial about having to go back.

I’m going to miss hostels – err, yes… and no, Minister. I met some wonderful people along the way, and dearly hope I’ll cross paths with them again at some point in the future. There’s a global fraternity of backpackers, of sorts: amorphous, mostly anonymous, every dorm room a set of strangers thrown into the same Venn diagram for one night only. I started keeping track of all the countries I had dorm mates back near the beginning, and a busker from Barbados in Liverpool made it an even 50. I’m going to miss being a part of it, but at the same time I’m desperately looking forward to having my own place and my own private space again. Hostels saved the very worst they could come up with to my very last hostel: brace yourself for when I get around to writing about Dublin.

I’m going to miss lots of little things that seemed strange at first, but which became my new normal along the way. Such as seeing dogs in pubs. Seeing dogs in supermarkets. Seeing dogs in bookshops. Some zoos even allow people to bring their dogs. I’m going to miss beautiful buildings and cheap food and finding unexpected Lenin statues and seeing white swans in the parks. Nothing against our black swans, but they’re not ‘Sydney’ swans. Every time I saw one was like spotting a friendly face in an unfamiliar place.

There are things, though, that I’m not going to miss. I’m not going to miss being assaulted by second-hand smoke everywhere. I’m not going to miss rationing my Vegemite. I’m not going to miss being driven insane by crappy wifi connections that drop out every two minutes. And I like seeing dogs in unexpected places, but I want to see my own dog even more. 

Most of all, though, I’m not going to miss missing my people. I missed my nephew’s first birthday and niece’s second: I don’t feel guilty, this trip was conceived before either of them were! But I wish I’d been there all the same. I miss my mum and dad and family and friends and Alice, who has been far more patient and understanding about this mad idea than I could have asked for. This trip was already being saved for before we met, but if there’s ever a Wonktiki 2 it’ll be a joint effort. 

Thanks for reading.