I just got one of the shortest but most exciting emails ever!

I sent this over the weekend to a work/travel company called BUNAC:

Hello,

I went to NZ with a working holiday visa through the NZ government in 2005-06. Can I work in the country again if I go through BUNAC? I am under 35. Thank you.

G

And just got this in my inbox:

Hi G,

Yes!

Regards,
Outbound Programs Coordinator
BUNAC USA

In 2005-2006, for 12 months I spent one of the most incredible years in one of the most incredible countries on a New Zealand “working holiday visa”. My heart never really fully left, and I’ve been plotting my eventual return, to Queenstown especially, ever since. Even Ray is pretty convinced he wants to live there, and he’s not even been yet. You’ll see on the left that NZ has always figured in on our itinerary, just before we go on to do a year with a working holiday visa in Australia, which I knew we could get. The idea was to have a sort of “reintegration” to the Western world after spending two years in some 17 or 18 countries in Asia. Imagine the shell-shock of that being your life for the past two years, then one day suddenly going from the crazy bizarro streets of Tokyo to the next day BAM: life back home in Phoenix, Arizona. Cacti! Desert! SUVs! Your car, your neighborhood, your STUFF! Being able to understand EVERYTHING around you! What?!?!

If you’ve traveled before, you might know exactly what the problem with that would be. If you haven’t, it’s a phenomenon I’m glad I was told about before the first I went overseas because otherwise it woulda been a pretty big head trip: Reverse Culture Shock. It’s when all of a sudden, just like at the beginning of a trip you suddenly find yourself smack in the middle of a life swirling around you that is totally different from where you came from, sometimes in the very most basic and fundamental ways, leaving your understanding of the world around you and how it works completely upside down and on its head. You expect this when you journey out somewhere new; but you probably wouldn’t expect such a thing when you go back home. I mean, home’s home right? What’s weird about that? But sometimes it can be just as disconcerting and unnerving to suddenly be back where everything is as it always was: understandable, sensible, and well…normal. Every day no longer different, every venture outside no longer an adventure (whether you meant for it to be or not!), the world of scouring guidebooks to find the best things to do and see in a new place every few days no longer applicable to you.

It’s REALLY GREAT to get home and see friends and family again, don’t get me wrong. But it’s a place that you know should seem familiar and right, but it doesn’t. You know it should feel more natural than the life on the road you just left, but it doesn’t. A lot of returning backpackers experience this, and can have a hard time dealing with it.

So to combat that utter shock to our systems and ease ourselves back into not only a more once-familiar world but also a more once-familiar lifestyle (for example…going to work every day!) while still getting to explore a new, different and cool place that we’ve always wanted to visit, we built in a year working and traveling in Australia at the end of our trip. But first we planned to spend the winter in New Zealand – Queenstown! – for the three months I could be there without a visa and enjoy an awesome season of playing ice hockey, netball, basketball, living in my old hostel, partying our 20s goodbye (too late in Ray’s case but we’ll let him slide), and snowboarding, snowboarding, snowboarding!

Well the more we’ve thought about it (and the more I’ve talked it up ;]), the more we realized we’ll want longer there. Even if we don’t take a full year since three of the months wouldn’t be spent doing rafting like I did before, I do want to show Ray the best of the country. And I’d really like to see QT in the summer as well as the winter. The only problem with this was that since I’d already done the working holiday visa (WHV), I’m no longer eligible for it, and so can only be in the country for 3 months without a visa. I think I MIGHT be able to get a tourist visa for 9 months, but the NZ immigration site has always been ridiculously inconclusive to me and google searches haven’t helped either. And anyway, by that point in the trip, we’re only hoping that our savings will have carried us even to that point, especially after Japan…let alone another 9 months living footloose and fancy free in a fully developed country. And one with really cool adventure activities and extreme sports ($$$).

But with this email…not only does it take care of the time issue, but more importantly, the money one. I am ecstatic, if even only for having this on the table as a possibility (the downside to the BUNAC program – and it’s a big one – is that you have to be in the States to apply, which would rather defeat the purpose). But whether we can get around that so the WHV works out or if I can score a 9-month tourist visa, we don’t know yet whether we’d want to tack on the additional time to what we already had planned for the trip, or just reduce the time in Australia. I probably lean more towards the latter at this stage. Especially if we could manage to get some savings back up while in NZ and not HAVE to work in Australia, we might just fancy ourselves a campervan figure-8 tour through the great outback and skeedaddle. I would love to spend a full year in another country, working and living and turning a foreign place into a home again. But I want to do that for probably about 20 countries in the world. I want to take the 3-year road trip through the United States I’ve always had in the back of my mind. I also want to go to an exotic animal training school and spend a decade or so working with dolphins (sorry Dave, I know you think they’re evil), maybe a decade working with elephants, and/or a variety of other cool and fascinating critters, open a hostel, run a bar, go back to school and get my Master’s or PhD, be a Residence Hall Director at NAU, teach at a high school and coach a couple of sports teams, and be a professor at a university as well…

But the fact is, time is ticking. I do want to have a kid too, and preferably my own, with my genes. We take it day by day here, but we do have to keep one eye on the horizon occasionally, and remember to balance out what we want much with what we want most.

But still, how could you resist spending more time in a place like this?:

Update 3/23 2:56a: Argh, foiled! BUNAC says yes you have to be in the US because you have to send them your passport. But there must be some way to do this… will keep working on it!

Update 3/23 7:00a: YES! Maybe? http://chrisguillebeau.com/3×5/how-to-get-a-duplicate-us-passport/ I’ve written Chris to see if this would apply in this case! (We met him in Bangkok at our first-ever “Tweet-up” when we first arrived in Thailand; great guy, fascinating ideas, awesome site – check it out!) I know he’s busy right now so I’ll wait (mostly) patiently to hear back from him! Will update again then!

Update 3/23 2:25p: Well he actually wrote back right away, but I figured I should probably get to bed. ;] He didn’t know if that would satisfy the requirement of my being in the US in this case, but I’m hoping it would. I guess we’ll see closer to the time. If anyone sees this and happens to know for sure, please drop a line.

Last Update 3/24 5:02a: Alas, it looks like the WHV may not work out for me. BUNAC says I have to be in the States, and while they do respond to my emails, they’re not really working with me much on it. Personally, I think we’d be able to get around it with the second passport. Maybe I’ll try again in a year. On a brighter note…it does seem I can do the 9-month tourist visa! Winter and Summer, here we come! (in 2012)

For now…back to Thailand!