Visas

I have been trying to navigate the visa requirements for all my preferred destinations. Some of it is very confusing. For the longest time I haven't been able to tell the difference between the needs of a working holiday, tourist, or volunteering visas.

Thankfully, the Australian Woof site has got an amazing website with actually links to visa requirements. A working holiday means you can have a temporary job and get paid a bit to offset your traveling. A tourist visa lets you do volunteer farm work in exchange for room and board, but you couldn't receive payment. The working holiday also requires you to prove you have a ticket out of Australia or enough money to buy one, so you have to show a bank statement of $5100. Yikes. If Australia is near the end of my travels, that might not be the case. Applying for the holiday visa is also more expensive.

The UK Woofing program is confused about their own requirements. Some people are turned around at the airport, some are let through. Doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason. Maybe my time in Scotland will just be to hike. The Malt Whiskey Trail is on my Bucket List.

Another helpful site as been the VisaHQ. Very simple Required or Not Required information.


We've been doing our State Testing at school this week which makes for a very boring day and a sore body from sitting and watching 10 year olds take a grueling marathon of tests for four days. It does provide a lot of reading time though. All week I have been looking at permaculture techniques, animal raising for food, and all that stuff when I found the Milkweed blog. It's a permaculture farm in Australia that has some close connections to Joel Salatin. Salatin was featured in Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollen, which really started this journey for me a few years ago. I started investing in better food and searching out meat that was grass fed. I started worm composting (not too successfully, but I still enjoy it). My brain is tired from all the input from this week. Grey water conservation, rabbit breeding, pig tractors, and earth bag building is just a few of the topics I've been consuming this week. I'm using as much as my time to get intellectually prepared before I go get my hands dirty.