My holidays: Juliette MacIver

The Italian sea village Manarola in Cinque Terre. Photo / 123RF

Juliette MacIver and Sarah Davis won the 2017 Picture Book Award at New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults for That's Not a Hippopotamus!

What was your greatest holiday?

In recent years we have taken to staying in a hut in the Orongorongo Valley. There is no electricity of course, or hot water, and we have to walk in for an hour and a half, carrying food for six. But it is sheltered and hidden and sunny and surrounded by native bush. It's wholly blissful.

And the worst?

I went with my father and my first child Louis, an 18-month-old tornado, to Akaroa on Banks Peninsula, a long-time family place. My husband Ken was finishing his final paramedic exams after years of working towards them. He flew down the next day to join us. That night, my father was sleeping in the bedroom above us, one storey up. Around midnight, there was an unidentifiable racket, like a huge wardrobe being hauled across the wooden floor above us. Then came an almighty crash, followed by awful groaning. Ken raced upstairs for his first job as a fully-qualified paramedic, in fully-useful pyjamas. He burst in the door to find the bedroom empty, the heavy bed dragged away from the window and the sash wide open. Dad had managed all this in his sleep, capping it off with what he later termed his Peter Pan act: leaping out the window. He lay concussed on the concrete path, with a broken pelvis. We spent the holiday visiting local doctors and driving back and forth to Christchurch hospital, all the while running around after Tornado Louis.

If we could teleport you to anywhere in NZ for a week-long holiday, where would it be?

Somewhere very warm and remote, in lush native bush, near a river. Or on a white-sand northern beach. In a rustic cottage populated with my children and husband, and one of our favourite families; say, the Matos. And I'd like to request a wonderful array of dishes available every night at the press of a meal-teleporting button.

How about for a dream holiday internationally?

I would like to flit with my family to Cinque Terre in Italy, and to Florence and Venice for gelato, then over to Spain for some street flamenco, and up to the south of France - a little villa please, by a friendly cafe - and then on to Paris for some super-fancy hotel accommodation, and down to a stunning Greek Island; then over to Peru for a shimmy up Machu Picchu and a stay with some singing, dancing locals, and on to the Amazon jungle to breathe in the steamy air and marvel at the wildlife, then to Egypt for a quick awestruck amble, and then somewhere hot and full of wonder like Kenya. That'll probably do for now.

Complete this sentence:

I can't travel without... changing location.

What's the most memorable meal you've had while travelling?

Back when I was strict vegetarian, I remember a meal I had as a guest in someone's house, in the north of Thailand (I met lots of friendly Thai people on that trip). It was a bowl of greyish-red gelatinous cubes, served in a sauce on rice. I valiantly ate my way through most of the bowl before I understood it was coagulated chicken's blood.