When I was 16 years old, I went on my first overseas trip. I went to Vietnam on a history study tour with my public high school, Albury High, for 14 days.
My family didn’t have a proper camera then because nobody was into photography. It wouldn’t be for another two or so years until I would have a proper digital camera, so my photos were taken on two cheap disposable cameras with plastic lenses. Each camera had 24 exposures on it, and one had black and white film and the other colour. I had barely taken any photos in my life before this trip. Now it’s unthinkable to me that I travelled for 14 days and only took 48 photos!! I would sometimes take up to 150 photos a day in Indonesia! These basic sorta-blurry photos almost make it look like I was over there 30 years ago instead of only 8.5 years ago!
The Vietnam trip was pretty remarkable for me. My family had never gone on any international travel. My dad had gallivanted around a little when he was in his teens on the scant money he earned from his odd jobs, but since then, nothing. In our small-ish “regional city”, back then we had two Chinese restaurants and newly opened Thai and Indian restaurants were pretty revolutionary. I’d never in my life tried Vietnamese cuisine and the population makeup of our town was far from being racially diverse. I’d also only been in a busy big city a couple of times in my life (but Australian “big” cities are obviously a far cry from Asia’s large cities, population wise).
At that stage of my youth, I thought I wanted to go to university in Albury and become a speech pathologist. I hadn’t really thought seriously about moving away to one of the more prestigious universities in the cities, though it was starting to tick away in the back of my mind.
I was honestly shit scared about going to Vietnam, even with my cool teachers and school friends, and at one point I almost thought about dropping out of the trip.
Sometimes, when I was on the road in Indonesia and even in Eastern Europe, I think about how lucky it was that I went…
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