Category: travel

Disconcertingly, my internal voice has started talking to me in the accent of Zelda the Destroyer, Ruth’s wrestling character in Glow. I have no idea why this might be, but it is particularly startling because I’m not having a lot of actual conversations at the moment, so much of what I do is narrated in this strange accent. I speak no Japanese–I haven’t even been able to work out ‘thank you’ yet. So there aren’t many opportunities for conversation, not even the small talk or the little jokes between people that we use to smooth out awkward interactions. Well, there was the man outside the 7-11 where I stopped to buy myself a sparkling water today (it’s hot and humid and I needed the sparkle) … there was a small bench outside the 7-11 and a few people were sitting on it so I sat down thinking it was probably more polite to drink my sparkling water there than as I wandered along the street.

I sat, and as I gingerly opened the bottle, trying to make sure it didn’t fizz on me, the man next to me laughed. It seemed like one of those things you might do when you’re sitting next to someone in the shade of a 7-11, and so I laughed with him. But then he started talking so I shook my head and said, ‘Sorry, English.’ ‘Ah, English,’ he said and I thought he was going to be one of those people who then starts a conversation in perfect English and makes a person feel embarrassed about their own lack of being able to talk to people outside their own language … anyway, he didn’t start talking in English, he kept talking in Japanese. It was about then that I realised as well as sparkling water it was possible to buy sparkling ale and I think he’d enjoyed a few out in the sun. I made my excuses as politely as I could given the circumstances and left.

And that’s about the extent of my conversations, my language barrier compounded by the fact that there aren’t really a lot of tourists here, or at least if there are they are lost in the Tokyo population. It’s not like visiting Paris where a person can hardly breathe for tourists and you get to the end of the day and wonder if you’ve even crossed paths with a Parisien. And while I’m not staying in fancy accommodation by any means, nor is it a hostel where people might go to the dining room to gather at the end of the day…mind you, even if I were at a hostel I’d probably be older than most of the other people and unlikely to get into any conversations there either.

So, having Zelda’s accent in my head is straight up weird. I will say that because it’s only in my head, it’s an excellent imitation of Ruth doing a poor imitation of a Russian accent. However excellent my imitation might be, I’m very much hoping that when I wake up tomorrow it will be gone.

As it turns out, the noodles were absolutely not to be missed, and definitely worth staying up for. I went down in my dress and carrying only my room key, expecting that we would be given a packet of two-minute noodles and sent on our way. Not so! The breakfast room opens again, but there are curtains around most of the buffet tables (there are four, all quite small), with only one small space at the servery open for the woman who has the noodle shift to do her work.

People come down in dribs and drabs, most of them wearing the lounge suits (I would call them pyjamas, but that seems maybe a bit rude, because they aren’t pyjamas but are in the hotel rooms with a sign that tells us we are welcome to wear them around the hotel). The woman gives a token to each person and then, when she has made their order calls out the number and tells them their noodles are ready. When she knows we don’t speak Japanese, she calls, ‘Thank you for waiting, noodles are prepared for number 7.’

I rarely eat before bed these days, because I always sleep terribly if I eat or drink too much too close to bedtime (probably I always slept that poorly but now that I’m middle aged I don’t like being tired the next day and get tired more easily and so on and so forth … all of that is a long-winded way of telling you that I wasn’t sure I’d actually eat the noodles, but I did want to see what it was about.

As soon as I saw them, I was in love and knew that they would be exactly what I needed. The noodles are the perfect size. Small enough that I don’t feel over-full and uncomfortable before bed, large enough that I feel sated. The noodles and the soup are both light and thin. Also perfect. The whole thing is extremely cozy, and because it is shared with other people, it is also a reassuring touchpoint, reminding you that you aren’t alone. All hotels should offer something like it, because as wonderful as holidays are it is pretty lonely when you realise that there are all these millions of people around but not one of them knows your name.

And now I’m extremely tired again and about to fall asleep. I wanted to tell you about my day–not that anything amazing happened to me, but I did discover a bit more about this amazing city. Maybe I’ll be able to stay awake long enough tomorrow night.

It turns out that an hour is enough time to get a domestic-international connection in Sydney airport, but it’s highly stressful and you don’t get a chance to sit and watch the airport go by. Sitting and watching the airport go by is one of my favourite things … mind you anyone watching me go by would have thought I was leaving my dying grandma and never going to see her again the way I was sobbing at the departure gate. Combination of the stress of realising how close my connection was going to be (but knowing that they don’t book it if they don’t think you can make it), but also growing deeper and deeper roots into my house into the next stage of my life.

I’m exhausted now … the only reason I’m still awake is that I’m waiting for the hotel’s noodle service in another twenty minutes. I could’ve gone to sleep hours ago, but there’s something so beautiful in the idea of a ‘noodle service’ and I’m only in this hotel two nights so I don’t want to miss out. Weird thing to not want to miss I know, but there’s been little in the way of rational thought the last couple of days. I’ll be a lot more lucid after a meal of noodles and a nice long sleep.

Talk tomorrow xx

Christmas, eh? I guess like most people who grow up with Christmas as a cultural marker I’ve had a fluctuating relationship with it. I have loved it (waterfights with cousins, yay!), I have scorned it with the scorn of a world-weary, uber-cynic who is only there because her parents made her, I have dreaded its emotional pressures, and I have been entirely ambivalent. (I am only talking here about the cultural aspects of it, not the religious aspects, though I think it’s fair to say this has changed for me over the years as well.)

This year it transpired that on Christmas Day we were in New Zealand, our first full day in the campervan. When we set out from Christchurch it was fine and sunny, and by the time we got to Aoraki / Mt Cook it was raining. The road was extremely busy with campervans. I guess everyone was from France or China or Germany or Japan and may as well be driving. We played my ultra-excellent Christmas playlist as we drove although it’s impossible to hear anything when you’re in a campervan. My goodness, they are rattly and bangy–I had bought a packet of blu-tac the day before and by the time I’d tacd down all the things that were rattling there was only the smallest blob of it left.

We went to a Department of Conservation campground which had a few other campervans and many, many tents. The mister and I have spent our fair share of rainy New Zealand nights in a tent and we were deeply appreciative of our dry space with its working stove and our dry sheets. What’s a bit of squoosh when you’re dry? We bored our children by retelling the stories of our youth. Like that first time we went camping in New Zealand. In our excitement at finding a car we could afford we didn’t check our eleventh-hand Honda Accord all that closely and it wasn’t until we were huddled in it for warmth one stormy night by Lake Waikaremoana that the silicone seal which had been used to hold the hatch together fell completely away and a sheet of water just poured in through the back. The LOLz, eh mister?

Other times when we’ve been away for Christmas there has been at least some time during the day when I’ve felt the absence from family. There’s a different quality to the homesickness at those times. But towards the end of the day this year I realised I hadn’t felt that at all this day. Perhaps because everyone was camping and so we didn’t get any glimpses into other people’s Christmas Days.

For their Christmas lunches the lads had chosen mac and cheese and spaghetti bolognese. I put together these Campervan Trifles which are strawberries, yoghurt, and iced animals. Iced animals are a strangely delicious biscuit although as I said on instagram they do look like they’ve been slapped together by someone whose kid waiting until 8pm Sunday night to mention Monday morning’s bake sale.

For our evening’s entertainment, we transformed the table into the bottom bunk and each of us found a space to sit or lie to watch Die Hard played on my ipad with the sound streamed through the mister’s wireless speaker. I think Die Hard is far more Christmassy than I remember it being when we watched it last year. After that we had The Nightmare Before Christmas. I loved it. I did fall asleep part way through, but I still know I loved it because I’ve seen it before and my sleepiness was to do with being sleepy and not to do with the quality of the film. The floppy adolescent also loved it. The other half of the family will never watch it again.

And that was Christmas in our campervan.

When I was growing up our family camped, first in a tent and then in a camper-trailer that we bought secondhand on a day trip from Port Pirie to Adelaide.

I remember that trip well because that morning I woke with a headache that felt like I was having knives stabbed through my head and a heaving guts. I did actually throw up when I got out of bed, but we had barely left the seventies behind and parents didn’t let a little thing like their child’s stabbing headache and squelching nausea get in the way of a trip to buy a secondhand camper-trailer. My dad did make a makeshift bed for me by taking out the backseat and putting the lounge cushions across the back so that I could lie flat–this meant that my brother and I travelled without seatbelts but again the seventies (you know sometimes you see those memes on facebook our toys were sticks and SHARE IF YOU AGREE, okay, yeah, sure the seventies sure were great LOL hahahaha).

Anyway, we bought that camper-trailer which was one of those arrangements where it was a fancy trailer with beds that pulled out from each end and keeping it stable was a pair of rather insubstantial legs that wound down and — if you remembered — back up again when you were making the trip home. It was like this only significantly less fancy.

My holiday dream was to stay not in a camper-trailer on a windswept west coast beach dragging a spade into the sandhills whenever I needed to go to the toilet (west coast of South Australia), but in a caravan parked in a caravan park. My goodness, the number of hours I spent daydreaming about those neat rows of caravans all within walking distance of a flushing toilet. Also, I was fairly convinced that I would meet a boy and we would fall passionately in love and spend the year writing letters before we met the next summer at the caravan park again.

I’m sure I brought some of this childhood longing to my decision to book our potential final family holiday in a campervan that would tour the South Island of New Zealand. Now, usually when I book things I spend countless hours researching every possible angle of every possible option before I finally hand over my cash. This time, I was booking in a bit of a rush because it was a last-minute decision to go and I know that New Zealand books out at this time of year. Also, I suppose because I’d spent an entire childhood lusting after a caravan, any caravan, please god just let me sleep in a caravan that it did not occur to me a van is not a van is not a van. Reading that this 4-berth van is “ideal for two couples or a family” and was available for the time we needed it, I just pressed ‘Book’ and paid the deposit. After nine nights I can say that as a family we worked it out, but deadset any two couples who can successfully negotiate a holiday living in this particular van are unknown to me (no offence). The two beds are bunks one on top of each other. During the day the top one gets lifted into the ceiling and the bottom one–through a feat of engineering and design–becomes the table. At night, the people on the bottom bunk have approximately ten centimetres between their noses and the bunk above them. Remembering that this is New Zealand so it is going to rain about eight percent of your holiday, this is not an experience for the faint-hearted and I think the word “ideal” should definitely be left out of the description of this particular van.

Other people had clearly spent more time researching the layouts of the van because we did not see another family with teenagers spilling out of the doors in this model van in any of the places we stayed. Do you know that strange thing when an emotion you haven’t felt for many years resurfaces in your body and it is immediately a touchpoint to a different time and place? Each time I saw one of the vans with the layout I should have booked I felt exactly as I had felt when I was a child in a yellow commodore dragging a camper-trailer behind it and we passed a caravan or a caravan park.

Somehow or other though, this was one of the best holidays we’ve had together. I will tell you more about it tomorrow, but in the meantime please enjoy the accompanying image which is at 7am on the final day of our time in this van. Ha! You think living together in it is tricky, you should try packing. At least one of those bags came to be resting there after it was thrown somewhat, um, energetically from the doorway.