Adventure is out there!

After traveling 18 hours by plane and another 7 hours by minibus, I was so happy to arrive in St Lucia, South Africa.
It was 35 degrees and 90% humidity.
We were tired, hungry and wanted a shower.
There was no hot water at our hostel, monkeys running around near our rooms and I was suddenly starting to think that I had made a mistake.
I am so glad that I was proven to be wrong. My two week volunteering trip turned out to be the best two weeks of my life.
I helped build a kitchen and toilets at an orphanage and church in the local village, taught some of the orphans about hygiene and basic English and assisted local conservation parks with their cheetahs and crocodiles. It was the life changing trip that I needed.
I'll never forget the day that we completed construction on the kitchen at the orphanage. It was smaller than the average Australian bedroom but it made the locals so happy. I felt like I had finally done something completely selfless in my life and it made me feel great.
It was so hard to believe that a simple thing like having an extremely basic and small kitchen could mean so much to the local villagers. It gave me a completely different perspective on the world and how I wanted to live my life.
No longer was I going to worry about having the best clothes or spending large amounts of money on material items that I thought would make me happy, I was going to appreciate the little things in life. No longer was I going to continue to take for granted the things that I was privileged enough to have: a warm, loving home to return to, clean water and an abundance of food; and family and friends to look after and support me. By traveling halfway around the world, I discovered the way to live a happy life: appreciate the simple things.
Every now and then, I have a flashback to my time in South Africa. The friendly smiles of the villagers, the sweet and sometimes overpowering smell of fresh pineapples from the local market or the sheer excitement on the face of the orphans after showing them a photograph I had taken of them, which was the first time they had seen how a camera operated.
I wholeheartedly agree with the quote that 'travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer'.