As told to Elisabeth Easther
For a long time I didn't really have a passion for travel but, after teaching PE in Te Puke for two and a half years, my girlfriend decided to go to London, so I thought I'd go too. I flew in about two months after the London bombings and, at the end of my first day teaching, I was walking out the drive when something flew past and I thought, "Man, that looked like a brick." I came across a feud between Turks and Kurds and half of them were in school uniform. Security ramped up after that, and for a while I thought I'd made a massive mistake but in the end I really enjoyed the school.
One long weekend we flew to Dublin on Ryanair and it cost us $23 each. We rented a car, stayed at a B&B. The whole thing cost two of us about $200. I couldn't believe how simple and cheap it was to have a long weekend in another country. That was a real eye-opener and the more I travelled, the more I realised there was to see and the more I wanted to do.
I met a woman from Canada - also a teacher - and together we moved to Toronto. I got a job at an outdoors shop, selling gear and talking to people about their upcoming travels, which was cool. My girlfriend's parents had a cottage in Nova Scotia so we drove there from Toronto. People say Canada looks big on a map but it's not until you're on the ground that you comprehend the scale. It took more than 30 hours of driving - after 18 hours, we were still in Ontario. My first winter there, it got down to -16C and I thought that was the coldest temperature imaginable.
In Canada, I had a job interview with a guy who was looking for teachers in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. He sold the place as having an up-and-coming cafe culture, and he made it sound quite cool. I accepted a job at the American School but on arrival, I realised the man's sales pitch was completely untrue although construction was booming. When we arrived there was nothing but grassland around our school and two years later, there were high-rise apartments and a supermarket. The countryside is stunning, although winter was brutal. If I thought -16C was cold, Mongolia got down to -62C. One great thing about the cold, we put boards on the football field then turned on the tap so for three months we'd ice skate for PE.