When asked to describe me the two terms that my friends seem to use the most often are ‘adventurous’ and ‘lacking a sense of self-preservation’. These two traits combined have led to some very interesting adventures! When I travel I like to spend a lot of time in one country so that I get a decent feel for it rather than racing through, seeing the sites, taking a few pictures in front of famous statues and hitting the road again. I also like to get right off the beaten track and see beyond what’s beyond the tourist trail. The first real adventure that I went on was to Vietnam with my best friend. We originally planned to cycle the country but quickly discovered we were nowhere near fit enough (and that the reason people cycle from north to south is because if you do it in the other direction it’s all uphill!) and so we upgraded out bicycles to a motorcycle. This probably would have been a better idea if either of us had ever ridden one before, as it was we took a couple of tumbles, lost a bit of skin, but learnt quickly and had the most amazing two months on the road! We walked out of Vietnam a little bruised and battered but convinced that it was one of the best things we had ever done. It also convinced me to get my motorcycle license once I made it back to Australia. I then managed a couple of smaller trips around the place, and a lot of travel within Australia (my home country) while I finished up my degree. Then at the end of last year, degree in hand, I was offered a job driving around Australia for 3 months. Well what would you do? I quit my job on the spot, packed up my life and within a week was in the process of a 3 month trip that took us 28,000kms around Australia. It was a bit of whirlwind but still amazing! After that I spent 4 weeks hiking in New Zealand, then a few months working to save up for the next leg of the trip- West Africa! Now I’ve traveled a bit but I had never seen anything like West Africa before in my life! I spent the first 6 weeks in Burkina Faso with a friend and then the next 3 months traveling through Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo and Mali alone and on the sort of budget that saw me doing things in a very authentic 'local' way (read into that traveling by the scariest transport imaginable, sharing rooms with rodents and eating street food!). West Africa was both the hardest and the most interesting place I have ever traveled to and if you’re at all interested in the sordid details I’ve put some of the stories up in a blog on this site. Some of the more interesting parts of the trip included getting caught up in an illegal petrol smuggling operation on the Niger River, taking a 4WD ute through the Sahara in the middle of the night with a group of locals (see the picture- it took us 15 hours to get from Gao to Timbuktu and I was on the back the whole time!) and spending a week alone in a Toureg camp in the Sahara in northern Mali (just south of Algeria)! At the moment I am taking a few years out to see as much of the world as I possibly can before working out exactly where I fit within it. I studied law but have absolutely no desire to be a lawyer (can you blame me for that!?) and am not quite sure I’m cut out for an office job, so if anyone has any suggestions….!  I have always thought the worst insult would be to be told I was leading an uninteresting life- I figure that life's for living and I intend to fit as much into mine as I possibly can!

Wave at Jen     Kick Jen

Give the lowdown on Jen C.