Quite a lot has happened in the 14 years since I ventured out into the world as a self-employed, not-very-solvent and not-yet-sober singleton at age 57. I’d been living back in my hometown in Australia for the previous 17 years while I tried to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I tell much of that story in my previous blog, My Own Two Feet: The Running, Trekking, Walking, and Other Adventures of Robyn from Oz (2009–2019) (http://myowntwofeet-robyn.blogspot.com), and in Skinful: A Memoir of Addiction (2022) (www.robynflemmingauthor.com). I’ve been sharing the day-to-day ups, downs and roundabouts of my peripatetic life on my Facebook page since 2007.
My life as a global nomad and an editor without borders had been interrupted in early 2020 by a romantic fantasy involving a man from my past. (For readers of Skinful: no, not ‘Tom’ – though I did put myself back in the ring with him again later for a brief period.) I shipped to Australia the contents of the apartment I had rented as a base in Budapest, Hungary, thinking my destiny lay in my home country. (The impending COVID pandemic meant I needed to take a leap of faith.) Just hours after I entered West Australian airspace, Australia’s borders clanged shut.
When this new fantasy quickly turned to dust, as mine are wont to do, I moved back to my hometown on the other side of the country. I’d come full circle after a decade away. It hadn’t been my intention to return to live there, but COVID border restrictions were in place everywhere. A series of decisions that had seemed right at the time positioned me somewhere I hadn’t planned to be, but there were worse places to spend the pandemic.
There was a lot to enjoy in my new-old life in Oz. I reclaimed all my possessions and created a home. I was able to farewell my younger brother Geoff when he died suddenly. (My parents had died within a few months of each other in 2020.) I worked hard to get my book into publishable shape and found the support I needed to send it out into the world, even if I couldn’t go there myself. I spent happy times with old and new friends. I continued to work remotely for my clients, ran and walked, travelled in-country, and took photographs. Photography is, for me, a way of finding something of beauty or interest in everyday scenes.
Still, I couldn’t imagine that this was my forever life. I’d soon be turning 70 and about to enter my golden years, but I wasn’t yet ready to settle down. There were places I wanted to be, friends I wanted to see. I wanted to experience again a bigger world than the one on my doorstep – a world I had learnt I could live in comfortably, happily, gratefully. By late 2021, I was at another turning point.
After recovering from two physical issues that incapacitated me for a few months – a broken elbow sustained from a fall during what ended up being my last run, and lower back pain from a compressed nerve – I decided to reclaim my life as a full-time traveller as soon as the pandemic would allow. I could still earn an income working remotely as an editor, and I could still manage the physical challenges of being nomadic. But there was no time to waste.
I put my possessions back in storage, found a travel insurer that would cover me for 12 months, researched the COVID requirements for travelling overseas, and moved to Sydney in early 2022 to await the reopening of Malaysia’s border.
In April 2022, I arrived back in Sarawak (one of two Malaysian states on the island of Borneo) ready to resume my adventures. Two years into my second life as a global nomad, I’m writing this in a café on the ancient main square in Sibiu, Transylvania. I’ll turn 72 in a few months and my lustre is tarnishing. I no longer run, but I walk 10,000 or more steps on most days. Occasionally, I think: ‘WTF am I doing?’ But mostly I see life through a positive lens. As a single, sober (since 2011), self-employed (but still not very solvent) 70-something, I’m grateful to be me and to be spending my golden years gallivanting around the galaxy.