Camper van grump

POSTED BY SI

We had an awesome time in New Zealand, as I’m sure you can tell. But it’s not all roses. And you know how much I love to be grumpy, so here’s my attempt to dampen your ardour if our little trip has made you think “Hey, maybe we should do a campervan holiday…”

- There’s an awful lot of driving.

I mean a lot. It’s a driving holiday, I know, but still. In order to see so many places in so short a time, clearly you have to travel between, but just like I hadn’t really appreciated just how much it rains in a rainforest, I was unprepared for just how much driving there is on a driving holiday. It’s a bit like being in a road movie – Thelma and Louise, Bonnie and Clyde, The Blues Brothers. Watching road movies, I think again you never really appreciate quite how much driving is involved.

We did well over 4000ks, but that’s only half the story – it’s not the miles, it’s the hours. Many NZ roads are narrow, windy and steep. They’re in good condition and the scenery is spectacular. Around every over bend is yet another breathtaking view. After a while you get a bit blasé about it. You have to. Especially the South Island. Driving through the mountains of the central South Island, if you stopped to look at every view you’d actually start to go backwards.

Children, views or no views, do not consider seven hours of driving a day to be a holiday. And to be honest, if you’re in the back of the van, you don’t see any views. You’re just killing time for seven hours.

It’s like being on a rubbish fairground ride. It’s pretty bumpy and you get thrown sideways every few seconds. You can’t read, much less write. If you’re determined and highly skilled, you might be able to watch a movie on a laptop with headphones without being sick.

When we started this holiday Maddie had only seen The Lion King once. She now knows every word. Not just the songs, the dialogue. All of it. Izzy is half way through series five of Friends.

Flick through all the road movies you can think of in your head. Count how many children there are in them. I’m just saying.

Other things to be aware of in a campervan:

- It’s not like a canal boat where one of you can be cooking while the other one is driving. Standing is inadvisable. Anything not put away or tied down will either be smashed or turn into a missile on the first corner.

- You cannot go anywhere or do anything until everything is washed up and tidied away. Think leaving the house with kids takes ages? Try taking the house.

- Cooking anything other than boiling water is a mistake. It is simpler and more effective to liberally drizzle the floor, walls, surfaces and all your clothes and bedding with animal fat than to cook a sausage.

- You will stay in campsites. Communal everything. Other people’s food, noise, rubbish.

- It’s a 2x3x6m box you share with three other humans for weeks on end. If you were cattle that would be classed as animal cruelty.

- You are carrying around your own excrement. There is no way to make this not disgusting.

- Take everything four people are going to need for a month. Or in fact, everything you think you’re going to need, which is an inevitable combination of way too many clothes but not enough underwear, roughly 25kgs of stuff you don’t need at all, and a whole heap of stuff you wish you’d remembered but didn’t. Empty all that into the 2x3x6m box. Try and find anything.

But you do get to go to an awful lot of places in a relatively short time. I can’t think of another way to do it, until they invent the Star Trek transporter. Other than by helicopter. And we’ve already established we’re going to get one of those. So there’s the answer. Helicopters.