I have been to a lot of funny places in the world, having worked odd FIFO jobs and travelling abroad, all while being really into maps: this is what I have to show for it. Photographing almost where I’ve been, I’m here to show you some highlights. Naturally, I have another map for everywhere I’ve travelled, but that’s for another time. I love maps and writing custom HTML for the rounded corners below.
Take a two finger zoom around the map. Blue marks are plant/work sites, green are camps, purple are offices. Not everwhere I have been is marked, and the majority of the fly-in-fly-out locations are lost as there was no phone reception and only a locationless photo as evidence.
My resume has the details of what I have been up to, but where I was, the resourcefulness required to live in the isolated corners of the map and the stories are something that defined me in my 20s. As a retropsective, I’m obsessed with seeing the projects I designed out, planned and wrote business cases for, which have developed in the decade since and things having had come to fruition after I moved on. As a water industry professional, the project lifecycle is in the order of 5-10 years to see plants comissioned, so this my way of seeing my babies come to life.
Let’s start with the Australian desert
Luckily, as a part of my job, I had to do whatnot with a drone, fly around and map out whatever I was doing. Back in 2015, drones were cool, unlike the bothersome flies at landmarks surrounded by tourists you see today.
Take a zoom in on some of the photos, you’ll see me in my drone selfies.
Here comes odd jobs
Working on an aluminium refinery, living in a shipping container
Working from random camps in Mount Isa
Working from camps in WA somewhere in the middle
Working as the only civilian in army camp
Then to the British Isles, where I didn’t have a drone
Regrettably, I must have taken the landscapes and work for granted as I my dearth of photos show. From regional plants in Wales, site visits to the south of England or wherever work took me, I made it my mission to take leave and adventure around.
COVID lockdowns weren’t nearly as harsh as other places in the world, so in my bordem, I moonlighted as a spin instructor while the drunken gym manager was otherwise occupied. Volunteering at a wildlife sanctury in Herefordshire deserves its own blog post, so it gets a special mention only.
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