Some foreign postings are shaped by war or conflict, others by politics or elections or terrorism.
I can't remember what stories I expected to cover when I arrived in Jakarta as the ABC's Indonesia correspondent almost five years ago but as I packed my bags to fly home, I realised my posting here has been defined by an unrelenting string of disasters, both natural and man-made.
Barely had I stepped off the plane in 2018, when a magnitude-7.5 earthquake struck the city of Palu on the island of Sulawesi.
It was a Friday night and I wasn't due to start the job until Monday. My six bags were still being delivered and the apartment I'd leased wasn't available for a couple of days. All I had was a small bag to get me through the weekend.
But I couldn't wait. Reports were coming in of deaths and a tsunami. I stuffed the few clothes I had into a bag and headed to the airport for an early morning flight.
The next ten days were heartbreaking and exhausting. Heartbreaking because the tsunami had caused massive mudflows that buried entire villages and thousands of people were dead or missing.
Exhausting because of the conditions in which we had to work.
A vast region had turned into a danger zone. Hotels had been flattened, and those still standing were too risky to sleep in, given the constant aftershocks.
The ABC crew – myself, cameraman Phil Hemingway and producer Ari Wu – took it in turns to sleep in the car or in a tiny tent in the car park of a hotel. We shared the hotel's one still-functioning bathroom with about 20 other guests.
When I finally headed back to Jakarta, I looked forward to some days off to recover, and time to settle into the 'real' job.
But as Palu faded from the headlines, another disaster quickly took its place and this became an all too familiar pattern.
A Lion Air passenger plane nosedived into the Java Sea, minutes after take-off from Jakarta's main airport, killing all 189 people on board.
The next week was spent doing live radio and television crosses at the port, where rescue teams were bringing in an endless collection of personal belongings, debris and twisted wreckage, all salvaged by navy divers from the sea floor.
Sodden clothing, life jackets, passports and shoes – so many of them from babies or small children – were lined up along the pier, where television crews filmed to document a tragedy that gripped the world. Years later that tragedy is still playing out in US courts where families have sued Boeing for compensation.
In the first six months of my posting I reported on earthquakes, landslides and volcanic eruptions. The day I flew back from a Christmas break I headed to the west coast of Java where the collapse of the infamous Krakatoa volcano had caused another deadly tsunami.
There were of course 'normal' stories in the mix, if there is such a thing – a sad but fascinating story about tiger extinction in Sumatra, the 2019 presidential election, and the violent protests that followed Joko Widodo's re-election.
But by far the biggest story of my posting was the worst disaster of all. And it's a cause of anguish that I couldn't stay in the country to cover it.
Even as COVID-19 began spreading in Indonesia, I never expected I would have to leave.
But in the space of a few days everything changed. In late March 2020 I was advised by my managers to return home as the borders were closed and the health system was on the brink of collapse.
My partner and I packed one suitcase each, expecting to be in Australia for a few months until the pandemic passed. At worst perhaps it might keep us there till the end of the year.
I could never have imagined it would be two long years – the toughest years of my career – reporting from Melbourne, my hometown, on a crisis happening in a different country and a different time zone.
I continued to live out of that one suitcase, and set up a desk in the lounge room of a rented shoebox, still working every day with the ABC staff in Jakarta, via WhatsApp.
We worked hard to cover the COVID-19 crisis in Java, Bali and the rest of the country as if I was still in Indonesia. Like my colleagues sent home from other bureaus, we relied on "stringers" and freelancers to film for the ABC in far-flung parts of the archipelago.
Zoom interviews have become a new reality in television journalism. But my own experience shows how essential it is to have correspondents living and immersed in the country they report on.
Instead, I would turn on the television each day and see nothing but the news and COVID figures in Australia.
In the end it was not COVID that prevented me from returning to Indonesia, but the fact that my visa for Indonesia had long expired.
The government in Jakarta refused to issue new visas for foreign journalists until early last year. By then the war had begun in Ukraine, and I was sent to London and Poland to boost the ABC's coverage.
I finally returned to Jakarta and the last year of my posting has been the busiest of all, partly due to even more disasters – the soccer stadium stampede that killed 135 people, the earthquake at Cianjur, and the deaths of 200 Indonesian children from contaminated medicines.
Many Australians only know Indonesia from holidays in Bali – or hearing endless stories about Aussies behaving badly. But Indonesia and its people are so much more.
It's a country that never ceases to fascinate, with a history and culture that constantly inspire.
The Indonesian people are surely the friendliest and most cheerful in the world.
The Jakarta posting has been a great privilege and at times a wild ride.
But like many other correspondents, I leave here feeling as if I've barely scratched the surface. There are so many more stories I still want to tell.
