Welcome to my travel diary for North and South America, where I travelled from October 2000 to April 2001.
In October 2001 I realised my life was going nowhere in Sydney, and decided to take another long trip. I quit my job and left where I was staying, put my stuff into storage and headed to America. After spending a week with my father in California, I flew up to San Francisco and began the longest trip of my life.
I did most of it alone. I met and made friends along the way, but I spent a lot of time solo in the times before social media. The more desolate areas of mainland USA were incredible, but the trip really started when I got down to Santiago in Chile and began an unforgettable three months journeying in South America.
At the start of April 2001 I flew to London and tried to start a new life there; but despite a lucky break or two it wasn’t to be, and after side trips to Italy and Turkey, I eventually flew back to my home city of Sydney in October of 2001.
How to navigate this diary
The Americas link at the top of the page in the main menu takes you to the main Americas page where you can access all the days of this diary. Alternatively, start reading here (or anywhere, for that matter) and use the Previous and Next arrows at the bottom of each page to navigate through the days. You can always keep track by looking at the date.
When you’re reading a page, you’ll see blocks of photo thumbnails (wait a little while for all of these to load onto the page). You can roll over a thumbnail to read the photo’s caption.
If you want to see full-size versions of these photos (highly recommended, as the thumbnails are cropped), click on a thumbnail. Once the image is blown up, you can navigate left and right through the full size images, or click the X in the top right hand corner to exit them and go back to the text.
Leave a comment at the bottom of any page if you feel like it.
Cool!