Of all the administrative challenges of moving, working out how to complete a tax return in France was probably the hardest part. There is little information online and all of my colleagues said that they paid someone to do it for them.
I found out quickly that the tax year runs from January to December. Fine, this seems more sensible than the UK’s April deadline. What was less obvious was that you cannot submit your return for the previous year (I will talk about this as 2018, as this is the first year I did so) until April or May of the next year.
Click “accès au formulaire” and you will reach the following form:
And hopefully, this will get you the required fiscal number. I never did this myself because it wasn’t an option – I had to send a paper copy. If you prefer, the paper copy is still an option according to the final paragraph of the section quoted earlier:
The final paragraph says “If you can’t declare online, you must get send a paper declaration.”
If you work in Geneva, you’ll pay tax as you earn – it’ll be taken off your salary. So the only reason to read on is if you want to claim back some of it!
In particular, you can claim back tax against “3rd pillar” savings – these are special savings that you can access if you either:
a) Retire
b) Buy a house
c) Leave Switzerland
You can claim back tax on around 6000 Chf per year – the amount changes slightly each year. If you’d like to do this, the first step is to set up an account – just go to your bank and they will do this for you.
Then after the end of the year, probably in January, you’ll receive a tax summary from your employer. At the bottom of this form, you’ll see a section like this…
Follow the instructions, enter the code and then you can do it all online: so much easier than France!
To claim back tax, go to “consulter et saisir vos déclarations fiscales”.
Then when you have logged in, click on “demander une rectification de l’impôt à la source”
Then click to make a “nouvelle demande”:
From here, I can’t remember exactly what you need to fill in (and I can no longer access it because the process is complete), but you’ll probably need to upload the aforementioned tax summary, along with proof of your 3rd pillar savings, including the exact date when you made the payment. My initial submission was lacking in detail (the date) but I received an online message asking for this, and was able to upload it later.
Then, hey presto, a few months later, you’ll receive a notification and a decent chunk of money into your bank account. Probably worth it.
So, you’re being paid in Swiss Francs (CHF), but most of your expenditure is in Euros in France (or elsewhere). Firstly, lucky you, you’re probably going to feel quite well-off! All you’ll have to pay for this is a bit of administrative faff, which I’ll explain below. I guess that this advice also works in reverse, but I can’t imagine many people will be in that situation.
Firstly, your employer will probably want to pay you into a Swiss bank account, although I have read that this isn’t always the case. If they do, you can set one up at any branch easily enough with a French address. We went with UBS because they seemed to have the lowest fees – all current accounts that I’m aware of incur a monthly fee (with UBS it’s just 3CHF for a basic current account – you have the option to take a ‘banking package’ for around 10 or 15 CHF). The only slight snag was they wanted our French tax number – which we clearly didn’t have as we’d only been there a few weeks. In fact, you don’t get a tax number until you have done your first tax return in France, which may be over a year later. I explained this and they suggested that they would ‘let me get away with it’ – I would have thought it was a common query.
They sold me a banking package including a CHF and a Euro account, which I took because it was free for the first year, but I quickly discovered that the Euro debit card they provided me with was terrible value – there was a fee for every single transaction in France. I kept the package for the first year, but never used the card.
I don’t know if it’s possible to do any of this before you have a French address, so it may take you a bit of time before you can get paid – I had to wait a couple of months.
Secondly, you’ll need a French bank account to pay your rent and utility bills. We set one up with our UK address because it was required in order to rent our apartment. Regardless, Britline by Credit Agricole is very convenient, especially if you don’t speak French – their advisors are really friendly and helpful, more so than any UK bank call centre I have encountered. We then later changed the address to our French one. Alternatively, just walk into any French bank, but you’ll need proof of address in the form of your ‘bail’ (rental contract).
One point to note is that you’ll have to pay an extra annual fee to get a bank card with either of these accounts (eg 40 CHF for a debit card or 100CHF for a credit card with UBS, 41 Euros for a debit or credit card with Credit Agricole) – something you’re probably not used to if you’re from the UK. If you want to avoid this expense… read on / skip to option 4 below.
So the challenges is – how do you convert your CHF from your Swiss account into Euros in your French account?
Firstly, a quick word about exchange rates – Ignore this bit if you already know about the interbank rate.
If you google “1 CHF in EUR” you’ll find out how much 1 France is worth in euros. This is called the interbank or visa exchange rate. It’s the best exchange rate you will possibly get, and it’s the same both ways around (eg. if 1 CHF was worth 2 Euros, 1 Euro would be worth 0.5 CHF). However, many foreign exchange companies will quote you a worse rate. As I write this, google tells me the 1 CHF is worth 0.89 Euros, but postfinance.ch only offers me 0.88 Euros.
Screen capture from GoogleScreen capture from Post Finance
So, one key point is that you want to be aiming for the interbank rate. Companies will often say “commission free”, but their rate will be 3-10% worse than the interbank rate. It’s clearly better to pay a 1% fee than to take this bad rate. All my figures below are relative to the interbank rate. So, how do you transfer money….
Option 1 – The lazy expensive way
Just transfer using your Swiss internet banking. We never actually did this but it is bound to be expensive. When I transferred money between my CHF and Euro accounts within UBS the fee was 1% off the interbank rate, which is actually pretty good. I suspect that there may be additional fees if you’re transferring to an account abroad.
Option 2 – The easy, cheaper way
Use Transferwise. You can simply use it to transfer money between any two different accounts. The fees are clearly stated and usually around 0.5%. You say how much you want to transfer and into what account, then it provides you with local (wherever you are sending the money from) bank details that you send the money to. This seems a little suspicious at first (I was slightly nervous when transferring £15,000 to buy a car!) but Transferwise seems to be a well-respected company and overall, this is the easiest and cheapest way to transfer a large amount of money. A friend of mine recently used it to transfer a six-figure sum for a house deposit.
Alternatively, you can set up an account with Transferwise, send CHF into your account, then send it on to a Euro account, again with a clear fee of around 0.5%.
Option 3 – The easy, even cheaper way.
Use Revolut. Open a Revolut account using the app: you can easily open accounts in GBP, CHF and Euros.
Get a debit card with your Swiss account (roughly 40CHF / year) and use this to top up your CHF account on Revolut (no fee). Warning – I have never actually tried this myself and Neil suggests in the comments below that it doesn’t work with a UBS debit card.
Transfer CHF to Euro within the Revolut app. This has a 0% (yes, zero) for the first £5000 per month. The Revolut app is also great for tracking the exchange rates, and you can set up an auto-exchange – asking the app to exchange your CHF to Euros only if the exchange rate reaches a certain level. So as well as saving on the fees, you will also end up getting a better rate. Note that Revolut gives a 0.5% worse exchange rate at the weekends (a bit weird) so it’s almost always better to transfer during the week.
You can then transfer Euros from Revolut to your French bank account (no fee).
You can also get a Revolut debit card (£5 one-off fee) that you can use to spend money / take out cash anywhere in the world and always get the interbank exchange rate with no fee – great.
Transfer CHF from your Swiss account to your Transferwise account using your Swiss online banking. This is fee-free as you’re just transferring CHF to CHF.
‘Top up’ Your Revolut account with CHF using your Transferwise borderless card. It will give you a message saying “are you sure you want to top up in CHF?”, because it thinks that the card is a UK card, not realising that you have CHFs in your transferwise account. Just say yes. Again, there is not cost to this process, you’re still just moving your CHFs around.
Transfer CHF to Euro within the Revolut app and follow the rest of the advice from Option 3. If you get a Revolut debit card, you won’t need a bank card with either your Swiss or French bank accounts.
Worth the hassle? By avoiding fees completely and getting the best exchange rate you’ll end up saving around 1-2%. This doesn’t sound like much, but remember that this is 1-2% of nearly all the money you earn. You may have guessed from my love of admin that this is the approach we use!
This applies to EU nationals who want to get a Carte / Titre de Sejour (Residence Permit) in France. This probably won’t be necessary unless your country annoyingly decides to leave the EU!
So firstly you have to sign up for a slot at the prefecture (council office) of your departement (county). In our case, the departement d’Ain, we booked these online here: http://www.rdv.ain.gouv.fr/booking/create/898
They ‘sell out’ quickly, so you need to look at the ‘start of the week’ – I am guessing this means Monday but I’m not certain.
You’ll have to fill in the attached ‘dossier’ (form), from when we applied in 2019, and this lists some of the documents you will be asked to provide. The bold indicates my surprise, because I was expecting to only have to provide those, especially after the email conversation below!
So the form only asks for 3 main things:
Current passport
Proof of address – must be within 3 months, so a recent quittance de loyer (rent receipt that you get every month). Best to take your rental contract with you too.
3 passport photographs
And then, depending on your situation, something to do with your working life. In our case this was:
Attestation from your employer stating the number of hours you work
In fact, when we arrived, we were asked for a whole lot more. Fortunately, my wife Alice had heard rumours that this may be the case, so we came prepared, carrying every document that we have. It felt like they were constantly trying to trick us – aha, you won’t have this – But we managed to pass every test!
So it was all a bit hectic so I can’t remember exactly what we actually had to provide (and we didn’t get to keep any of the documentation so I can’t look it up) but most things were pretty standard. They have a photocopier in the prefecture so if you need to copy anything, you can do it during the process (although this will add to your stress! – I would photocopy all of these in advance). From memory, we provided:
Full Birth certificate – I say full because until about a year ago, I just had a short form as my parents didn’t pay for the full one. We’d heard rumours about translating it, but they were fine with our French one.
Livret de famille (Family booklet) – this obviously doesn’t exist in the UK, so we gave our marriage certificate.
Salary slips for at least the last month, maybe more. You may as well take a copy of your employment contract just in case.
RIB Relevé d’Identité bancaire – Standard Information about your bank account.
Proof of health insurance that covers you in France – this was the trickiest bit, as it had to be in French and most of our communication from our Swiss insurer is in English. Luckily, we found a document in French that expressed this. It would now be a lot easier with us as we have registered with Ameli.fr and have a ‘carte vitale’ (French health insurance card)
Beyond that, I can’t be certain, but you may as well take along:
Tax returns if you have them – we hadn’t been here long enough.
Bank statements?
It seems (from the documents they gave us) that we applied for a “carte de séjour permenant” which surprised me, because I thought you had to apply for temporary 1 year permits first. Perhaps being from the EU makes a difference.
Anyway, we managed to satisfy the demands, deposed our dossier and 4ish weeks later we got a letter asking us to arrange an appointment to pick up our Carte de Sejour – hurray! Another 3 hour return drive, just to pick up a card. On the plus side, it’s valid for 5 years and is apparently easy to renew.
We lived in AirBnBs for our first 3 months in France. This had advantages: we got to know the area so could decide where we wanted to live, without being fixed into a contract / having to move all our things. However, a big drawback was that it was really hard to receive mail: the French postal service doesn’t like delivering mail to an apartment if your name is not on the postbox – we tried sticking ours on, but it was removed! This rendered all the other practicalities of moving more difficult. So, we were excited to finally start looking for a permanent place…
I imagine that it varies from agent to agent, but we found the process remarkably long and detailed – it was pretty much harder than buying a house in the UK! In all, from choosing a place to moving in took a month, though I think the August holidays were a factor in this.
At some point (occasionally even before you see a property) you will be asked to provide your ‘dossier’. This seems to require pretty much your entire life history. We were asked to fill in the following form. On the back, you can see the list of documents required, and I’ve elaborated / translated below.
Proof of address: ‘Quittance de loyer ou taxe foncier’ – we used a council tax bill from the UK
‘Titre de séjour + carnet de travail’: We didn’t have a title de séjour at the time, so we just included my Swiss work permit.
‘Livret de famille’ (family book) – we provided our marriage certificate
Employment contract, highlighting the type of contract (CDD – contrat de durée determiné – fixed term contract or CDI contrat de durée indeterminé – permanent contract), annual salary
Salary slips for the last 3 months. I had already been working in Switzerland for more than 3 months when we moved, but otherwise I guess that UK salary slips would have been fine too.
“2 dernières avis d’imposition sur le revenu” – I can’t remember actually sending our tax returns to them, but maybe we did.
RIB (Rélève d’identité bancaire) – Summary of your banking information, This doesn’t exist in the UK but I think we just provided recent bank statements. We have since acquired a French account – the RIB just contains the name and address of the bank and our account number.
We also provided links to our glowing positive AirBnB guest reviews, and pictures of the house we own in the UK, which apparently would help us to secure the apartment (there were other people who wanted it).
Sounds like a lot? Well that was just the initial request!
Further on through the process, they decided that we had to have a French bank account, putting us in the classic catch 22 situation that it’s hard to get a bank account without an address, and vice versa. In the end, we set up an account with “Britline” (a section of Credit Agricole) – as fairly fluent French speakers, we felt bad resorting to the bank aimed at helpless Brits, but it did make it really easy to set up an account with our UK address and later move it over to our French address.
Before we moved in, we had to provide proof of insurance for the apartment, which we got through Direct Assurance (there are comparison sites like in the UK – I have now forgotten the English name of https://www.lesfurets.com/)
And then just at the last minute, they told us that we would have to pay the deposit and first months rent by cheque! Apparently this is common in France, but we didn’t have a working cheque book so we managed to convince them, after quite some debate, that we could do a bank transfer. I was half-tempted to write them a cheque with an outdated Halifax cheque book – I think they would have been happier with that, and it may have taught them that cheques are not secure!
Incidentally, we still don’t have a cheque book and so far it hasn’t been a problem – I see it as an attempt to educate the French that cheques are a bad idea. One of my colleagues sees it as a refusal to fit in with local customs.
Finally, we secured ourselves a lovely flat – hurrah!
Firstly, there are two bits of vocabulary that are used all over the place and you’re expected to know what they mean: Carte Grise – Certificate of Ownership Carte Verte – Certificate of Insurance
I may have missed something, but nearly all cars seem to be sold be at garages – there are few private sales. This may be because the paperwork for transferring ownership of a car seems to be more complicated than in the UK. You have to log on to a system which requires a French social security number – something you’re unlikely to have if you’ve just arrived here and are working in Switzerland.
There are some specific car-based websites, but like many things in France, the best place too look seems to be https://www.leboncoin.fr/ which looks suspiciously like gumtree in the UK – I imagine it’s owned by the same people.
So – Find a car, agree the purchase and send the money to the dealer. Note that second-hand cars are generally more expensive than the UK. We considered importing out UK car, or some people buy from Germany or Spain (at least then you’d have left-hand drive) but my research suggests that it’s unlikely to be worth the hassle.
Buy insurance – https://www.lesfurets.com/assurance-auto is the equivalent of a UK comparison website one whose English name I have forgotten. It worked out that directassurance.com was cheapest for us – I remember that we had to speak to them on the phone quite a bit in French, which my wife didn’t enjoy! They really want a “Relevé d’assurance auto” – a document from your previous insurer which lists your history of car insurance, even if you’re not trying to get any no-claims bonus. An obvious challenge, as this doesn’t exist in the UK – I managed to get my UK insurer to write a specific letter and email it to me – eventually this worked, but I had to translate parts over the phone and it had to have the current date on it – very complex!
A final complication of the process was that in order to “sign” the contract online, you need to receive a code to your mobile phone… which must be a French number. We didn’t have one (and in fact we still use our UK contracts because it’s free to call family!) so had to get our hands on a pay as you go SIM from the supermarket. We still use this as our French number, when one is necessary.
When you have completed the insurance ordeal, take a copy of your temporary insurance certificate to the garage, along with proof of address (ours accepted a receipt from AirBnB – I feel that we got lucky here!) to the garage, which will charge you to transfer ownership. The garage we bought from tried to charge us 500€ for “frais et plaques”. I pointed out that the official government fee was more like 250€, so convinced him to charge me just this – I don’t think new number plates are worth the other 250!
Side note: French number plates have a small number indicating a department (county) – this used to be the department that you live in, but now it can be anything, so it seems largely irrelevant.
Your Carte Grise will arrive in the post, you then need to send a scan of that to your insurance company to validate the insurance, then and only then, will they send you your Carte Verte, which includes a small square portion which you should display in the windscreen of your car. This is simple enough, unless you were living in an AirBnB like us, in which case you can’t receive post very easily in France! More on that in the accommodation section!
I recently made the move from the UK to France and found it surprisingly difficult to find information online about some of the boring but necessary practicalities.
There are a few sites that want to charge you money for their services, but I was looking for fairly simple, generic information so I wouldn’t expect it to be proprietary.
Nonetheless, it proved remarkably hard to find information online and people I spoke to didn’t seem to have a clear picture of how things worked either! The most common responses were: “we live in Switzerland”, “my husband deals with that” or “we pay someone to do that for us”. Being a thrifty Northerner, I wasn’t having any of the final option!
Finally I have muddled through and worked things out, so I thought I would share the thrills of admin in France / Switzerland.
And just in case this feels a bit much… a few reminders of how great it is to live here:
Just over an hour to Chamonix, for walks with amazing views of Mont Blanc.20 Minutes to your nearest ski resorts, to get above the clouds in winter.Great festivals in Geneva all summer… beer, food, music, film.About an hour to Col de la Colombiere, where we started this walk.My commute isn’t too shabby either.Fancy a weekend in Verbier? No problem.Bargain wine tasting weekends in glorious Lavaux.You’ll struggle to find this view in the UK.
If you’re following my route from the North Island, you’ll arrive at Picton on the ferry and continue heading south.
After a brief stop at one or more of the vineyards around Blenheim (The Brancott Estate was nice, but felt a bit posh for us – we preferred the Jackson Estate and – more casual yet – Allan Scott), head to Nelson. It’s a cool town with some great places for beer, including the Craft Beer Depot and The Free House – a converted church, very much to my liking!
From there, westwards to Abel Tasman National Park. This is a relatively unusual national park for NZ, as it’s less about the mountains and more about the beaches and sea. You can hire sea-kayaks, take a boat trip, or just take a walk along the coastline path, possibly using a boat to get there and / or back.
Further south, and you’ll reach Nelson Lake’s national park, confusingly not particularly close to the town of Nelson. There are some huge lakes that you can take in from the roadside, but you will be missing out if you don’t take the overnight hike to Angelus hut.
From here, you have a long old drive down the west coast, with not a lot of people or sights along the way. There are some not-too-exciting glow worm caves in Hokitika, and two major glaciers, Franz Joseph and Fox, further south. Some people rave about these, but we were unimpressed. The standard trail stops several miles (perhaps slight exaggeration!) away from the glaciers, so you can’t see a great deal. You can pay your dollars for an (admittedly reasonable value) helicopter flight onto the glaciers themselves but my advice would be that if you want to see glaciers, come visit us in the Alps and you’ll get a lot closer for a lot less money!
Onwards to Wanaka, where you should visit Rachel Sidda, (if you know her!) chill out by the lake, and climb either Roy’s or Isthmus Peak – both offer spectacular views of lakes and mountains. Next, Queenstown: probably the most trendy place in New Zealand, with lots of cool restaurants and bars; you must take part in the obligatory huge queue outside Fergburger. From here, an optional trip along the lake leads you to Genorchy and the trailhead of the Routeburn Track – I’m not usually a fan of there-and-back walks, but this one was well worth the trudge of the first 5-10km.
From here, it’s a long drive round to Milford Sound, so many people take a day trip by bus. As a spectacular must-visit destination, it’s a bit of a shame to only spend a few hours there, but it’s not easy or cheap to stay in Milford Sound itself, so the bus is probably the best option. We extended our time in the valley by walking the Greenstone-Caples track, but still only spent one day in Milford Sound itself.
Your journey is nearly at an end and, to be honest, you’ve left the best bits of New Zealand behind. Round off your trip with a drive over to Dunedin, which felt like one of the more normal towns, and then up the coast, possibly via Penguin spotting in Oamaru or Timaru. If you need one last dose of mountains, pop inland to the innovatively-named Mount Cook Village. Apparently this place is mostly covered in cloud, but if you show up on a clear day, you’ll get some spectacular views of New Zealand’s highest mountain – a great way to end your trip.
Finally to Christchurch, where you’ll inevitably partake in a bit of disaster-tourism as you check out the ruins from the 2011 earthquake – yes, many buildings still haven’t been fully repaired. From here, you’ll fly back to the real world. Many months later, it may feel like a surreal dream. Do people actually live permanently in this beautiful, isolated land?
I didn’t write my blog with the intention of providing useful information. However, quite a few of my friends have asked for advice on New Zealand so I thought I’d add a couple of retrospective posts.
This first post will give a general overview of the main sights that New Zealand has to offer for tourists. I will follow this up a second post aimed at people who are keen to exploit the amazing array of walking trails and mountain huts that the Department of Conservation maintains.
I will list this as a five-week itinerary – an epic tour of the whole of New Zealand. If you’re making the 24-hour-plus journey from the UK, I think you should seriously consider spending this long there, but if you wish to do it in less, just cut out parts that interest you less. My route starts in Auckland and ends in Christchurch, but the reverse route would work just as well.
Auckland – Welcome to North Island! The the largest city, we didn’t even go there because cities aren’t really my thing. If you’re a city person, try it, but if you’re a city person, you probably won’t really enjoy NZ!
Bay of Islands – Sub-tropical islands and beaches north of Auckland. Again, we didn’t go there (not a great start advice wise!) because I’m not that in to beaches, but there are also some culture and history in the form of important Maori sites. It’s a long way off the route, so will add 7 hours to your already long drive.
Hot Water Beach and Cathedral Cove – This was our northernmost destination and I was shocked by how spectacular (and tropical-feeling) these beaches were. Dig yourself a natural hot-tub, fed by underground thermal rivers, then take a walk through Cathedral Cove. You can comfortably do both in a day, but may wish to stretch it out… take note of the tide times, which affects the best time to dig your hole.
Hobiton Movie set – again, we didn’t go here, but I thought I should mention it, as I’m sure some LOTR fans will not want to miss it.
Rotarua – We didn’t like this town much, but it’s the best place to see geothermal New Zealand in action; ie. lots of expensive spas and a foul stench of sulphur everywhere. We did stay in a great campsite about 30 minutes away: The Waitangi Valley Thermal Pools: as the name suggests, there is an on-site spa and entry is included in the price of your campsite.
From here, you have three options: to travel down the West, Centre or East of the Island. Of course, you can incorporate parts of both, but it will make for a very zig-zagging route over small, poorly maintained roads – we did this, but we had 3 months!
Eastern Route:
Taupo – We went here for a Parkrun and to cheer on some friends, who we met in a mountain hut, in an Ironman race. The town seemed nice enough, but not that exciting otherwise.
Napier – Famous for its vineyards, it’s one of the warmest and driest parts of NZ. We stayed at a really great AirBnB with Malcolm and Liz, who felt like our parents by the end of our stay. As well as the vineyards (Black Barn was our favourite), there was a great farmers’ market and scenic views from Te Mata Peak. The coastline is also famous for its surf: for us, the beaches were not as scenic as elsewhere, but if you like long, straight beaches, there is plenty of sand here. The town of Napier is also known for its art-deco style buildings, mostly built after a huge earthquake levelled the town in the early 20th century. The town houses a museum with a thorough exhibition all about this disaster.
Central Route:
Tongariro National Park – Passing ‘Mount Doom’ from Lord of the Rings, the Tongariro Alpine Crossing is one of the most spectacular day walks in the world. It took us around 5 hours – leave up to 8 if you’re not so fit. It’s not a loop, so you need to organise transport from one end to the other (From here, you can leave your car and get a shuttle to the other end, or local hotels can organise transport to the start and from the end.
Western Route:
Taranaki – We spent a week in the Taranaki area and I personally loved it. We had great views of the volcano from pretty much everywhere we went, including the main town of New Plymouth. It’s known as an arty town and we particularly enjoyed the Govett-Brewster art gallery, as well as the great views from the very short but very steep climb to Paritutu Rock. Nothing, though, can surpass the views from the top of Taranaki itself. If you’re reasonably fit, you can walk to the top and back from North Egmont visitor centre. When I visited in mid-December, crampons were advised but not necessary; however, there was a significant amount of snow and ice for the final 500m, so I wouldn’t have been comfortable without solid walking boots and poles.
Whichever route you choose (perhaps add a week or two and do all three), your next stop will be Wellington. A hip, hilly city, it’s probably the place that we’d most like to live in New Zealand. Home to our favourite peanut butter Fix and Fogg (visit their little counter to taste and buy) and probably our favourite restaurant from our whole trip, the Aro Cafe, we enjoyed the feel of this place. Whether you cafe hop along Cuba street or walk up to the Mount Victoria lookout, it has a bit of something for everyone. It’s also the place where you will take a ferry to the South Island…
I’ve read tales of people returning from long trips and finding it very tough to return to normality. I should reserve judgement, but I doubt that will be the case with Alice and me, especially as our life will be quite different post-travel.
As I think back over the past 9 months, I have a huge number of great memories. I have learned on this trip that I have a strong tendency to remember the positives of travel and forget the negatives. Just this morning I was fondly thinking back to jogging around Brisbane, fondly remembering the sense of space and the freedom to run about cities with no time limit or commitments. At the time, I was pretty bored of Australia.
As I’ve written before, I don’t regret one day of our three months in NZ and I feel that we’ve had the right amount of time in Patagonia too. A key lesson is not to rush a country. In retrospect I would have learned some Bahasa and spent all of the first two months in Indonesia; this isn’t to say that I don’t have amazing memories of snorkelling in the Philippines, a country I found rather unpleasant at times, or Vietnam, which had food that I loved but made me sick(!)
Overall though, I have scratched just 6 new countries off the map that my Highgate colleagues bought me when I left London. It can be very tempting, especially for someone with my slightly aspergic personality, to see the map as a target and plan accordingly. I’m glad we generally didn’t fall into that trap (ok, two days in Uruguay was indulgent). This is my number one piece of advice: don’t try to visit too many countries. Instead, think carefully about which countries you really want to visit and why.
So apart from a shaky start, I feel that our overall plan was pretty good, but even so, Alice and I both missed home (partly friends and family, but partly just the comfort and stability of not moving around all the time) quite a lot at different times. In future, I doubt we’ll ever travel for 9 solid months again; instead, we would prefer three 3 months stints, with some time at home to relax in between. If you’re planning a year of travel and you can afford this approach (and I don’t think it would cost much more than ours), I would seriously consider it.
Driving through the outback in Australia.
I almost don’t want to write this because it sounds snooty, but when I think back over the 9 months, I feel a sense of privilege. To have been born in a country and at a time where world travel is so easy and affordable is very lucky. For even my parents’ generation to have undertaken such a journey would have been much more adventurous and arduous.
But just to be able to take nine months off work is a luxury that so few people in history have been able to afford. On top of seeing a lot of new places, I’ve read books, listened to hundreds of podcasts and spoken to an even greater number of people in foreign languages, learned to appreciate my family more, improved my empathy and ability to compromise (a bit!), made friends who I hope to stay in touch with for life, and written this blog. It’s been great.
