Women in Rajasthan. Photo / Getty Images
Elisabeth Easther talks to the Turnaround Manager of the Interislander Ferry.
As a family of seven, childhood holidays usually involved piling into the six-seater Falcon station wagon — sometimes with a caravan on the back — and driving from Wellington to Urenui in Taranaki.
Squeezed in, no seatbelts, we'd play
in the river or the sea. We'd watch fishermen bring in their catch and we'd get sunburnt. In our last year of school, seven of us piled into the back of a mate's Kombi to do a tour of the North Island. We spent New Year in the Taupo motor camp, then it was up to Coromandel and Mt Maunganui with all the bogans and booze, bottles and fights. We sampled the joys of the Whangamata pub, sleeping outside in the carpark, and scooting in and out of holiday parks to use the showers. Every day we'd set off with no idea of what we were doing or where we were going, but we always got somewhere. It was a very slow trip and every now and then the van would break down, and one of us would have to perform open-heart surgery on the Kombi, tools and grease everywhere, the engine exposed. One thing I learnt is Kombi drivers all wave at each other, they share a camaraderie that you don't get with Holden or Morris people.
When my girlfriend (now wife) told me she was going to South America, I said if she made it India, I'd come too. Here's me with just two days' overseas experience under my belt — a weekend in Sydney — and we fly straight into Kathmandu. If Sydney felt foreign, this was another planet. We spent a couple of days getting used to the sights, sounds and smells while doing what Lonely Planet told us to do, because that's what people did back then.
Our first night bus was meant to be a six-hour trip but it actually took 10. The roads were crazy and windy; up and down the Himalayas we went with trucks overtaking buses overtaking other trucks, all coming towards us on blind corners, at speed, with the horn. Yet they all seem to miss, so you think that it's working, till you come round a corner and see a tangle of wrecked vehicles. Two people actually got off the bus, they just freaked out. Anyone who's been to that part of the world knows you either love it or you hate it. It takes some getting used to, the assault on the senses, but I loved it.
