I have been wondering what it took for me to decide to get involved in the travelling business before I even started studying. Last night I found my travel diary from Australia.

We sat in a bus that had survived the seventies with other twenty something people. My butt was sweaty against the leather seats and stiff from sitting on those small seats the whole day while the bus drove through the dirt roads. There was a group of young Japanese seated in front of me sun glasses on their noses with their backs straight and cameras eagerly ready for what ever they may see out from the window. The German girls were sleeping with their heads together, leaning against each other’s shoulders and the Canadian twins were playing cards on their laps. All we could see from the window was red sand and dry vegetation getting even dryer in the burning hot sun shine as our bus was slowly moving towards the centre of Australia, the sacred rock of aboriginal’s, Uluru.
Suddenly Tom hit the brakes and yelled eagerly in the microphone “On your right!”. Each and one of us pressed our noses on the right side window to stare in to the eyes of two meters long, wide as a man’s tight, black, serial killer: the world’s most dangerous snake, aavikkotapaani. The guide, bus driver and chef of Adventure Tours, Tom, left us in the safe of the bus and hurried out to scare the unique snake away to the bushes before it gets hit by a car.
A few hours later the very same man drove off the main road and set us a camp. He rumbled through the trailer attached behind our bus, to get each one of us a “swag”, a water,- wind,- and animal proof sleeping bag, set up a fire and created the most delicious pasta meal you can possible put up out in the outback, on an open fire! Then he told us stories about the skies above Australia and creatures living under it. After the stories of dingoes that ate babies and babies gone missing at Uluru, he kept us- who couldn’t sleep, company by the fire and asked many questions about the thousand lakes of Lapland and Santa Claus and nightless summer nights, northern lights and traditional barn dances and promised to come to see it for himself one day.

The next morning I woke up seeking for Tom and found him right in the same place as where he was when I fell asleep, smiling his white smile on his tanned face, making coffee and toasting bread and frying bacon on the fire he had kept burning the whole night. And then he led us to outback for a whole day hike.

Lotta Lonka