I've been bitten all over.

I've known it for a while, but now I've finally come to terms with the fact that I've been bitten all over, by the bug, the incurable travel bug.

It's in my hair, my skin, my eyes, even my blood. My blood races as the bug takes over, telling my brain I've been in one place too long, time to book another flight.

I think it was about 10 years ago I was first bitten. I was in Thailand and I was 13, my first taste of the foreign and the unknown. I guess looking back, there could have been many other bugs that bit me, but it was the travel bug that sunk it's teeth into my young naive, freckled skin.

Once spat at mothers who failed to control their wild young sons who roamed the world on a shoestring, the travel bug is now used to diagnose any situation from a retirees annual trip to Noosa, to those wanderers who have only a backpack to call home.

Out of the past four years I've spent more than half out of the country. Of that time, 98% has been spent in non-English speaking countries, and less than half in first world countries. I have taught myself two languages, rented a house, got a haircut, interviewed politicians, dealt with police, got lost, been found, been harassed and admired, all in foreign environments.

And I can't wait to get back and do it again.

I've been home just on four months. Not that long in the grand scheme of things, but to me it feels like years. After a slight hiccup once I returned home, I then found a job, rekindled friendships and regained what resembled a busy and exciting social schedule. Between social soccer, AFL games with family, gym classes, Spanish conversations, theatre nights, dinner parties and weekend escapes, I settled back into life in Australia.

On the surface anyway. Underneath I was lost, I was struggling to fit in, I no longer felt like I belonged. People were boring, the weather was shit, and work sucked. The once annoying question of "Where are you from?" became silenced, and I felt unloved. No one cared about my year away, the things I saw, the places I went or the people I met.

Except those that were there with me. When I think back to the time we camped in a Mexican woman's front lawn surrounded by roosters and a dozing grandmother, I chuckle to myself. When I remember swimming in a million year old river in the middle of the Sierra Madre desert, I smile. When I think of strolling across the Brooklyn Bridge, I reflect. When I think of sailing from Panama to Colombia for five days of hell, I shudder. And when I remember the utter destitude in Medellin, where 1 in 4 doesn't have a home, my heart leaps.

I want to live more experiences like this. I want to fill my mind with incredible memories and I want my dreams to become a reality.

But I wonder, what will happen to me? Will I ever find a cure for this bug? Will I ever become a homebody, content to visit a timeshare in Noosa every year?

Somehow I don't think so...