Do You believe in something? Or someone? Most people would start talking about their religion, when answering that question. Lots of people have always relied on religion to guide them through their hardships. And it’s fair enough. No one can blame them for looking for support in something higher than themselves. Probably makes them feel much better. I, myself, have never believed in anything closely religious in my life. All I’ve ever had, is faith in myself. That I can do this shit. Whatever life throws at me, I’ll deal with the consequences and move on. I can’t even tell exactly, how many times I’ve proven everyone (myself included) wrong and turned the tables, when everyone least expected it.
As You’ve found out by now, I’ve come through all kinds of crap to get to where I am now. The only person I could rely on, every single time, was me. My friends were there, sure, but they also had their own shit to deal with. In the end, every decision I’ve ever made, has been my own. This also means, that every time I’ve made a shitty decision, I could only blame myself. Being responsible for Your own decisions is a heavy burden. It can weigh You down over time. During those times I sometimes think how nice it would feel to be able to pass on all my responsibility to someone else. Get that heavy burden off my shoulders. But sadly that’s not how life works. Nobody’s going to help You if there’s nothing in it for themselves.
The World isn’t run on money. It’s run on debt. Debt includes monetary debts and moral debts. Sometimes moral debts far outweigh monetary debts. When You ask someone to help You out with something, You’re immediately in a moral debt with them. The next time they need something, You better be there. Some people, of course, have no morals, so they keep taking everything and using everyone around them. How long do You think they can keep that up? After a while that person will start to get turned down by everyone they used, since they’ve never paid their debts. The bigger the debt, the bigger the responsibility. Think country-scale. USA paying off American Indians. Germany paying off the Holocaust victims and Australia paying off Aboriginals. Not to even mention all kinds of political moves that are seen daily on the news. Someone’s always in debt. If You want to live Your life debt-free, You’ve got to rely on Yourself. And of course on Your best buddy, who You’re in all that shit together with. You wont be able to do everything by Yourself and therefore You’re never going to be 100% debt free. Having faith in myself has brought me through some of the weirdest and of course heaviest scenarios in life.
When I first moved to Australia, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. You see, Estonia is pretty far off from Australia economy-wise. After buying the visa, the tickets, the medical insurance and covering other running costs, I had around 500 euros left to my name. A single person can survive for a month with that money in Estonia. But in Australia that’s like a couple of days salary. After paying for a week of bunk-bed rights in a hostel and buying some food, I noticed, that half my funds were gone. That’s the moment when my faith kicked in. Sure, some alarms went off in my head. I could’ve kept thinking “Oh shit, what am I going to do” like a lot of first-time backpackers do. I saw loads of that kind of people. They’ll just linger in the hostels, sending out resumes on the internet and then they’ll be angry or depressed about not finding any work. That’s the wrong approach. My buddies and I kept walking around the streets asking for work instead. We hopped into every hostel, checked the notice boards and asked everyone about finding some work. By day 3 we took a train to some countryside farm, where we spent a day slinging balls of hay into a barn. My faith paid off the exact moment that farmer paid each of us $150 for the day. “Damn”, I thought. “We’re gonna be just fine…”
In the next few weeks I put up an ad in Gumtree. The ad included a picture of me and a nice wall of text with hourly rates. All of a sudden I had work coming in from every direction. Different odd jobs – mow someone’s lawn, help some school teacher build his house for a week, clean some gay dude’s pool half naked. Wash some MILF’s car in her driveway, while she was sipping ice tea and stalking me or even directing traffic for a day. The job didn’t matter, because money was coming in and the system worked. It came to a point, where I had a notebook with all the appointment dates written down a couple of weeks ahead of time. That’s also when I learned about placing Your trust in strangers. One day this girl called me and asked if I wanted to be a male model. “Fuck yes, why the hell not”, I thought. We set up a meet in a public park. This should have been the first red flag. The first thing she told me upon meeting her, was, that she came with a rental car. I was just thinking about the barrels of money I’d possibly be wheeling into my hostel room, so I completely ignored that flaming red flag as well. Somehow it didn’t even seem weird that we went into the public toilet to take some ambiguous pictures of me. She turned the conversation topic to porn while taking some pictures and asked if I wanted to do some. I remember thinking something along the lines of “Fuck, this might turn out better than expected”. So she ended up taking lots of close-ups of my dick and me in different banging positions. She promised she’d call me, when she jumped into her rental car and drove off into the sunset. She never called. My toilet-nudes are somewhere out there and that’s how I learned to never trust strangers.
You’ve already read how we ended up as homeless bums in the Kalgoorlie desert. We both found work around our second week in Kalgoorlie. After finding work, we felt bulletproof. Like kings of the homeless. Because of that we figured, that we should just keep going with the flow – embrace the whole bum-life and keep living in our tent, completely rent free. I think we both spent our first paychecks on lots of food and snacks. We were in severe calorie deficit, which we were trying to keep up with. Having to walk everywhere didn’t really help. I believe we clocked around 20km per day each. And we were always carrying our valuable items with us 24/7. We even found ourselves an anthem for our endless walks.
We had systems upon systems to keep ourselves alive and our belongings safe. For example: we threw a handful of potato chips behind our tent every night, so the huge poisonous ants had something other than us to bite on and steered clear from our tent until the morning.
Before waking up every morning and going our separate ways to work, we packed up our whole campsite. We stored most of our clothes and other less important items in different bushes around our campsite. So if someone found one of our bags, others wouldn’t have had hopefully been compromised. At one point someone actually did find GLive’s briefcase and vandalized the whole thing. Lucky for him, he mostly stored clothes in that one. But he did lose his whole supply of contact lense solution.
We usually met up in Hungry Jack’s or the library, where we were more like regular tenants, as the latter was the only place for us to recharge our electronics. We spent most of our weekends there – perfect for hiding from the sun, while watching some movies. We kept living our nomad lifestyle for a whole 3 months. Three fucking months of battling heat strokes and camping in an actual Australian desert. Faith helped us through Kalgoorlie, but fate wasn’t done with us yet…
I had kept in contact with the same chill Aussie guy, who gave me the train ticket money. And he had found me a car in Perth. It was on it’s way to the junkyard, but lucky for us (or was it?) I had him buy it for me. We named it The White Sabre – a tribute to The Green Sabre from San Andreas. It was going to help us in our future search for farm work all across Australia.
As You already know, The White Sabre got badly vandalized by some Aussie street thugs. After that we started driving north. So far I’d been the one, who did all the driving and it had become an exhausting chore for me. Problem was with GLive – he didn’t drive. Like me, he, too, had attended some driving school lessons in Estonia, but dropped out before finishing his exams. I was already driving around Australia with ease, so it seemed like an appropriate time to help him back on the saddle as well. Started him off on an endless Aussie highway and off we went.
We finally arrived in Karratha after 2 days and 1500km’s. Finally back to civilization and cell phone signal. Boom! A voicemail had appeared. “Hi, This is Smokey from ‘hgakhaksdgjasg’. I’ve got a job for You and IVAN for 3 months and it all goes towards Your 2nd WHV’s. So call me back on this number, see ya!”. Wait, from where? GLive listened to that voicemail for probably more than 20 times, until we figured out that the town was probably called Pemberton, which was 2000km’s south of us. Long story short, we did the trip, so we ended up driving over 3500km’s in about 7 days to make sure we got the job.
You know that feeling when You’ve ‘suffered’ for a while for whatever reason and then You get back up and slowly start feeling great again? Feels good, doesn’t it. What’s the worst thing that can happen at that moment? That’s right – getting kicked right back into those gutters. We had gone through so much crap in those past months and it finally felt like we’re about to get our shit in order. But fate had other plans for us. Fate fucked us over big time. We lost everything in Pemberton. We ended up bed sick for over a week. Took me 10 minutes to get out of the bed for a ciggy. Muscles strained all over our bodies. And what’s even worse – we ended up financially fucked as well. You’ll find out what happened soon enough.
Faith works in mysterious ways
Another great example of having faith happened after we’d been living in Dunsborough, WA for about 6 months. We had just finished the compulsory 88 days of farm work for our 2nd WHV’s and had decided to move on. The grass always seems greener on the other side, doesn’t it. We didn’t have an exact destination pinpointed, but I had one town in mind. I had met this Estonian girl a bit earlier. We fucked for a couple of weeks and then she moved on to this little Southern-Australian town called Renmark. I was eager to fuck her again and figured we’d also look for work while we were down there. I guess we were all pretty tired of this farm-work life, so a random road trip was a much needed breeze of fresh air. The White Sabre was history by then and we were now rolling around in GLive’s very own first car – The Toyota Ferrari. We had a huge farewell house party with over 100 people and a DJ right before we left. We’ll probably talk more about our parties sometime. Our new Estonian friend Face decided to join us on our journey. So as we were battling some of the deadliest hangovers ever, we set out on a 3300km road trip, so I could get my balls drained…
Lots of sights were seen. Australia is a beautiful country with long roads. Too fucking long, if You ask me. We realized along the way, that by the three of us, we probably had enough money to survive for about 3 weeks. But we had faith. We figured we’d surely pick up some work, once we got there. We were driving in shifts, so we made the whole 3300km road trip in 72 hours. We were fucking exhausted, once we arrived in Renmark. So we rented ourselves a crappy little trailer and started our careers as trailer park bums.
After about a week of looking for work, we realized that it was the off-season and there was no fucking work for us there. I was happy, as I had my balls drained for the whole week, but the reality was something else. Every hour we spent there, meant, that we were burning through our small savings like wildfire. Our only option was to get back on the road and pick another spot. We still had faith. Our next stop was Sydney. We went there just for the Opera house.
After Sydney we were all in the ‘Doomsday’ mood. It was the 21st December of 2012. The world was supposed to end that day because that’s when the Mayan calendar ended. I remember feeling like it would have been a good day to die. We were high on life and had been on the road for a while. We were even discussing how it would end. GLive thought, that maybe an asteroid was going to drop in the ocean and cause a huge tsunami that would wipe everything out. Face thought, that maybe the sun would burn everything off Earth. I just kept staring at those beautiful skies. Shortly after that we found ourselves in Nimbin – a beautiful little town. It’s sort of like Australia’s own small-scale version of Amsterdam. Almost everyone You see there, is on some kind of drugs. No alcohol is sold there. Great place to get stuck in for a while.
We drove through all of the states, except Tasmania. We battled constant 35-40 degree heat and lots of kangaroos on the road. Those fuckers definitely have a death wish. We ended up in Darwin. That means we drove 10000km’s in 15 days – 7 of which we spent in Renmark. Our friend Face drove 1000km’s in one go. The top speed record of 155km/h belongs to me. I also had the most roadkills (2 rabbits and 2 birds). GLive drove the most overall distance – over 3600km. One hell of a journey. Each of us found lots of quality work in Darwin. Our faith in ourselves is what brought us through it.
There have been lots of other moments throughout my life, when believing in myself has got me through the shit-storm. I always pick my battles though. If there’s no way in hell I could turn a situation in my favor, I just move on without ever touching it. However, once I see that bright light full of possibilities ahead, I start believing in it. I’ve found that there’s a solution for every single problem. It’s just the matter of finding it and then putting in the work. As You know, I’m a planner. First, I plan to find a solution. Once I’ve found it, I start solving my problem. I usually start believing in it half way through. That makes me work even harder. And that’s probably why most of the times my plans work out. It feels so damn good, when they do. Especially, when no one else thought they would…