Early Journeys
I haven’t done a whole lot of planning in the past week - I’ve booked all my Chinese hotels, and have assembled everything I need to apply for the visa. I will have to go to Christchurch with a hard copy of all documents and to get my fingerprints taken: after that, it’s a four working day turnaround. I think I’ll time it so I go to Christchurch in the last week in May. I’ve also been watching YouTube videos of people in China, to get extra ideas - my list of things in Shanghai could easily take a month to accomplish, and I’m not there for even a week!
Speaking of YouTube, Yan’s visits to “Unseen China” are truly inspiring - her work is better than any travel documentary on TV that I’m aware of. She is Chinese and going well off the beaten track, and showing just how fantastic China can be.
I have come across an interesting app, which allows for a map of my journey to be created. It costs money to have more than ten stops and for travelling other than by plane, but this is what my first ten stops look like.
Since I don’t really have any planning to write home about, I’ve been thinking back to early journeys. I have no recollection of the first two. My parents had this tale to tell that when I was a toddler, under three, I somehow crawled on to a train - they had to go to the next station to collect me. I hope it was a south bound train, as that would only mean about ten miles.
My next journey was rather more involved, and I really am surprised I don’t remember any of it. When I was three, my parents moved - from a blip on the landscape called Pukerau, ten miles north of Gore (Southland, New Zealand) to Pouto, north of Auckland - 1800 kilometres in all, including a ferry. I was the oldest of three children, we had two dogs, no doubt some household stuff, roads would not have been as good as they are today, and the car certainly wasn’t - it would have looked something like this:
I don’t recall the journey at all, yet I still have memories of the store we used to shop at when we lived in Pukerau.
My father was not one for travelling - when we moved to Pouto, his idea of a family trip was to go to Moerewa. Now, this is not a place firmly planted on the touristic map. It is the seat of a meat processing plant (we call them freezing works). My parents were farmers - we would send livestock here, but every so often, a lamb or two would not be accepted (I think) for export and we would have to go and collect the reject lambs. It was an up and down on the same day trip of around 100 miles each way, and they would be full on journeys over rough roads.
I think I was about 8 when my father was convinced we should go visit the relatives in Southland - by this time there were four kids, I was still the oldest - and Dad’s plan was for us to travel with a caravan. It was all of about 12 or 15 feet long, and silver - but not an airstream - I am pretty sure it was a Zephyr. Whatever it was, it was tiny for a family of six. We had upgraded the car, so at least that element went well. I still remember sleeping outside the caravan, rolled up in a small tarpaulin, in Greymouth. I’d say we did the whole trip in two weeks or less.
Mum did sneak us away without Dad for a couple of holidays - to Auckland and the Bay of Islands - and my brother and I, when I was 10 or 11, flew south to stay with relatives for the summer. Left to her own devices, I think Mum would have been a traveler. When Dad passed away, she was happy to drive around the country, mainly to visit us kids but she did dream of getting a camper van and just going wherever. She never ever did that, but in her last year, she went on a major holiday - I did all the planning and bookings for her. This trip involved flower shows in London and Amsterdam, a river cruise on the Danube, a train through the Swiss alps and finally catching up with her friend in Germany. It all went off swimmingly, with only one minor mishap involving not getting of a train at the right stop or something like that.