With our closest friends, we always have special memories shared just between us. Hilarious moments, beautiful hikes, funny mishaps, and almost being hunted after a serial-kille– Wait, what? That’s right. Read Vanessa’s vivid stories of her exhilarating experiences in the cold and dark, through rainforests and mangroves, shared with her newfound friends. UniverSalPals, our exchange journal series, is back with our fourth feature.
Name: Vanessa Ellen Nah Mei Yin
Exchange School: Australian National University
Save for our car’s headlights glowing weakly in the darkness, the night was pitch black. A blanket of silence engulfed us, as my friend in the driver’s seat next to me killed the engine. She and two girls got out to set up the camera and inspect the sky for the Southern Lights on long exposure, while Desirae and I stayed in the car. Before we knew it, almost an hour had passed. Just as we began dozing off, nestled in the cozy comfort of our cushioned seats, a cry broke out from the opened car boot, where the other three girls were sitting. Desirae and I turned around to see a bright light and an indistinct figure of a large, broad-shouldered man with a huge black bag over his shoulders and a scarily sharp object in his hand lumbering towards us.
As it turned out, this man was no murderer, but a kind gentle photographer who had come with his camera and tripod to help us. One of my friends had posted on a Southern Lights Facebook group asking for tips, and this friendly veteran responded, offering to help us amateurs out. My friend had completely forgotten that she had accepted his help and shared our location with him. We really thought we were that close to being murdered in the dead of night in the Tasmanian wilderness by a serial killer, with our mangled bodies never to be found. To this day, that night remains one of my fondest memories during my Study Abroad experience. I’ll never forget the fear, confusion, panic, relief, and amusement I felt – all within the span of a few minutes!
In fact, those emotions summed up my every travel experience while I was in Australia. I had learnt the most from my travel and new experiences, each always began with worrying.
“Would going on a road trip to Tasmania with four other girls really be a good idea?”
Tasmania is that little often forgotten island at the bottom of Australia that people don’t notice much, but should notice more. It’s a gorgeous and unbelievably picturesque land with amazing landscapes and absolutely stunning, raw, natural beauty.
By day we travelled along coastlines, through sun-dappled forests, and up and down rolling green hills; by night we inched our way through pitch-black side roads, our headlights carving out a thin light beam in the inky blackness. We tried our hardest every night for the entire week we were in Tassie to see the Southern Lights – and we finally did on the very last night! That satisfaction felt was immense and wholly gratifying.
But even on the nights when we didn’t see the Lights, I simply loved being there in that moment, in that darkness, staring up at the scattering of stars sprinkled liberally across the night sky. It was a landscape of its own. I remember standing overlooking a small bay one of the nights and looking out into the southern ocean, the crisp and cold night air sweeping across my face. At that moment, I remember thinking to myself, wow. Short of Antarctica, I’m as far south as I can go. I’m on the edge of the globe, at the bottom of the earth – and I felt on top of the world.
“Should I leave the safety and comfort of my bed to stumble out into the freezing night at 4am just to see the sunrise over the Blue Mountains?”
Short answer? Heck yes.
“Would a horse ride through rainforest, mangrove and beach be worth three days with no internet or phone service in Cape Tribulation?”
Does my happy face answer the question?
There I stood in the high humidity and 30°C, staring at a pandan plant in the middle of a rainforest. Nope, I wasn’t in Singapore, but the Daintree region of Australia. The Daintree rainforest is not only the oldest continuously living rainforest in the world, but is also “where the rainforest meets the reef”. You walk through the tropical rainforest, then spy the buttress roots of coastal mangroves flanking the footpath, and before you know it, the trees clear and you’re on a sandy beach! There were three completely different environments adjacent to one another.
I had the pleasure of taking a 2-hour horse ride through the remarkable Cape Tribulation terrain. I’ll never forget the feeling of riding along the shoreline, hearing and seeing the sea on my right, eyeing the somewhat incongruous mangroves on my left, feeling the heat of my horse beneath me and the cold salty sea breeze on my face. That weekend in Cape Tribulation was a truly immersive experience: no cell service, no mobile data, no wifi – a technological detox. After 3 days of being away from everyone and everywhere else, I’d never felt more in touch with myself and who I wanted to be.
I had never gotten answers to my worries and questions before taking a leap of faith and saying “yes!”. Too often we are afraid to do new things overseas because, frankly, it’s scary not knowing what may happen. I found that friends helped a lot in assuaging fears and levelling up my experience from “great” to “unforgettably amazing”.
The warmth and kindness from people I hardly knew always surprised me. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt about friendships from my exchange, it’s to value it. You never know when you’re meeting a friend you may keep for life, or a friend who’ll one day repay your generosity; after all, kindness begets kindness.
There was one girl in my ANU hall who, on her very first day in Australia, dramatically fell to the floor and fainted in the kitchen midway through cooking. She hit her chin on the countertop and chipped a front tooth and though she wasn’t otherwise hurt, the tooth needed professional attention. I wasn’t close to her, but I knew I would have liked a buddy to go with me to see a dentist in a foreign country if I were in her shoes. I accompanied her the next day to a nearby dentist, and so began our friendship!
A few weeks later, I cut my finger in the kitchen, deep enough that it took a while to staunch the blood flow and it left a small scar. Guess who was also in the kitchen, no fainting this time, and leapt up to give me iodine and a plaster? Later on in the semester we also travelled together to Sydney, and found our travel dynamic to be more than compatible. Guess what? She’s Desirae! Not long after, we travelled to Tassie together and survived our close shave with the Southern Lights ‘serial killer’ experience. She “proposed” to me, asking me to be her roommate when we returned to Singapore. I didn’t even have to think before I said yes. 🙂
If I were to sum up what my experience in Australia taught me, I’d say I had learnt to be kind, think less and do more. I learnt to be daring and grab a friend (or a stranger!), make plans and go for it, instead of worrying for days over what could go wrong. Things will go wrong. They always do. But the beauty is in seeing how you deal with it, the adventures that emerge and the friendships forged along the way. No matter what, you’ll learn something from the experience – even it’s just never to do it again. And if nothing else, at least you’ll have a funny story to share when you return home 😉 So go and make new friends, have yourself new adventures!
–
UniverSalPals is an initiative that invites students who have gone for NTU-USP Study Abroad Programme for a semester to journal and share about their adventures, changes in perspectives and their growth paths on exchange. Living in a foreign environment for 5 months isn’t a long time, but you can’t say it’s short either. You’ll be surprised at how much a semester exchange abroad can teach you – both about the world and yourself.
