Kitchen Nightmares

Given that New Zealand and Australia are so expensive, there’s been a need to cook as many meals as possible I keep overall costs down. This was fairly straightforward in New Zealand, but not in Australia. 

The hostel kitchens in New Zealand were all very well equipped. They had everything you need from all your pots and pans, stoves and ovens, and even basic ingredients like oil and spices. Australia kitchens are an absolute mess in general. There’s usually no oven, and a severe lack of utensils. 

I was really good at cooking as many filling meals as possible in New Zealand, and the well equipped kitchens helped massively with that. I actually lost a lot of weight as I was cooking the majority of my own meals. It’s a different story in Australia though, where you get so fed up of the ill equipped kitchens, that you regularly end up eating at McDonald’s or somewhere else equally easy to get food. So the weight I lost has slowly started to creep back on. 

Australia kitchens also seem to be incredibly dirty. The scenes I saw in Byron Bay haven’t been uncommon throughout Australia. 

While I also enjoy cooking at home, it’s a bit of a chore when you’re on the road. You have to inspect the kitchen first before you go to the supermarket to buy food. The main issues you find which will decide what you cook are whether there is an oven and how much space there is in the fridge. 

I’ve also had to carry round essentials like oil, cereal and Tupperware boxes, which isn’t ideal when you are hopping from place to place. Well, with only 10 days left in Australia, with most of them either on tours or travelling from one place to another, I’ve decided to call time on carrying my kitchen stuff around, and have left it for others to pick up. I’ll survive on easy to cook meals for the remainder of my time here. 

As we move into Asia, kitchens in hostels are a thing of the past, as you usually get a free breakfast and then you eat out for your other meals with it being so cheap. Therefore, the days are cooking are over, at least for the foreseeable future, and I am actually looking forward to it. 

I did stop myself from disposing of one Tupperware box however. I realised that I’ve had this box since I went to secondary school, meaning it’s nearly 20 years old. It’s still in beautiful condition and so I just couldn’t throw it away!

There will likely be places that I visit in the future that require me to start cooking again, but for now I’m going to enjoy the time off!