Family Recreation

I'm a man of my word - a few too many words if truth be told. Back in Chile I promised the kids that on our return to Cork I would invest in a game of table soccer (or taca-taca as the Chileans had it). Yesterday, already a bit ragged from my first week's work, I stopped off in Lidl supermarket to buy their special offer. That Lidl had table soccer as a special offer was in itself a sign. It was meant to be. This sport of kings, now our official family sport, was destined to work its way into our home.

Who would have thought that the buggers weighed so much, though. Even with a strapping Pole by the name Piotr helping me to carry it out of the shop, I nearly became the first fatality ever recorded in the annals of the sport of taca-taca, almost flattened by a flatpack. It would have been an honourable exit to be sure, but somewhat premature in my table-soccer career (ah yes I remember Lawlor, they would say, full of promise but never made it out of the carpark).

It seems that fragments of our journey are trying to make their way back to us. After I finished putting together the table, I headed out to buy some beer. What should wink at me from the shelf but a six-pack of James Boag - a fine and flavourful Tasmanian beer which kept us good company on many's the evening in Oz. Let me tell you now that there are very few things as satisfying as a good beer to wash down a resounding taca-taca victory over people half your size and a quarter your age.

This isn't just recreation, it's a recreation of our journey. The fastest, most chaotic way to play taca-taca is in four - the speed is a multiple of a two-person game. When the four of us are around the table we are suddenly back on the road, back in our Fiji sandals or our Chilean boots, screaming our heads off.

It's not that I'm suffering from nostalgia for the road - at least not yet. The only thing I really miss since we came back - and especially since I returned to the office - is my girls. They were the stars of this show. It wasn't perfect - there were many problems along the way. But it was real. By the time our journey was over we had a slightly different way of communicating - a better one. A number of people have asked us, since our return, how we coped with the logistics of travelling with children for so long. The truth is that logistics is what we do at home. During what little time that I can afford each day with Nina and Sara, I typically spend it managing them. Telling them what to do. Mealtimes, tidying up, bedtime - family life can be very regimented. Of course we had to do these things on the road as well, but there was always loads of time left over. Time to explore together places where none of us know what we would see. Time to talk through problems and disagreements rather than to just issue parental diktats on the way out the door. Time to just hang out and begin to actually enjoy each other's company, and learn a little more about each other as people.

These are things that cannot survive the return home in their entirety. There's too much competition. The girls want to spend time with their friends, and I'm missing 40 hours a week. But we've noticed some changes. Since we got back, Nina and Sara are willing to spend a little more time with us, forgoing time with their mates. And with the memory of the trip as a reference point, a living example, we can reach for other, better ways of communicating rather than the rushed staccato set-pieces of the past.

So when it is just the four of us, around the taca-taca table, screaming, twisting, punching the air in triumph or burying our faces in our hands - we could be anywhere. It doesn't really matter where we are. The spirit of the trip returns with a speed and strength that makes me think that it will never be far from the surface.

Cooney's World Adventure

I posted a couple of months back about another family, based in the US, that planned to sell up and travel the world for a year. Well, the Cooney family have taken off, just 5 days after the Lawlors returned. They are currently in Mexico. You can follow them here.

I'd like to wish Mike and his family every good wish as they begin a journey that they will never forget, never regret.

Last Tango in Buenos Aires

Tonight is the last night. I can scarcely believe it. I know that I have said in previous posts that I was ready to come home, but it seems we have barely arrived in Buenos Aires and now it is already time to leave. This time tomorrow, all going well, we will be on board a British Airways flight to London, and with a connecting Aer Lingus flight we'll be in Cork at about 11am on Wednesday morning. The level of anticipation, and disbelief that the moment is here, is almost equivalent to that of our first flight, almost 8 months ago, to Beijing.

If you have enjoyed reading this blog, please stay tuned as I will be posting for a few weeks to come. I have memories of Cusco, Lima and BA that are still to be recorded, and of course even the homecoming itself and the effect it will have on all of us is a subject that might interest you. Especially if you are thinking of doing something similar yourself.

About halfway though our trip, when we got to New Zealand, it started to dawn on me that 8 months isn't very long at all. Time is the enemy, marching imperiously on without a backward glance upon the destruction it leaves behind. We did this trip now, as opposed to being sensible and waiting until the kids were older, because we had no idea of how long this life, this planet, or our freedom to travel around in it, might last. It's a cliche, but a fine one, that the right time to do something that you need to do is probably right now (adding on a year or two for planning!). While stocks last. But now our stock of eight months has been used up.

Time always wins.

But in two ways, we might have pulled the wool over its eyes for a while. Firstly, the memories of this trip will last me and Letizia for the rest of our lives. I hope that the same is true for Nina and Sara. And more: I hope that what they have experienced over the last 8 months will serve them forever. Not just to give them a taste for travel, but so that they might always remain certain that whatever life shows them, there is always something else out there. That they should never feel that they have seen everything. That they should not assume that what they see around them is the only way to live. That they should never feel trapped by illusary limits.

Secondly, even if time is the enemy, the greatest gift we had during these 8 months was the time we spent together. It is unlikely (though not impossible) that the four of us will ever share quarters in quite so intense a fashion as during this trip. I spent about 3 years worth of free time with my children, when compared to the time that I would normally have had with them at home. While this has been challenging at times - above all for Nina and Sara - it has also helped me to understand a little better who they are and what I need to do to be a better parent. The trip hasn't been about seeing the world as much as it has been about living a more intense family life, with China and much of the Southern Hemisphere as the backdrop. I should be clear about this: I am no better a father now than I was when we started. In many ways Nina and Sara got to see some aspects of my character that they might have been better off shielded from. (For example, I swear a lot. I normally offload my daily dose of profanity in the office, and I'm ueber-careful at home. Not on the road, though.) But I think we understand each other a little better, and even if that doesn't automatically lead to a better relationship, it can pave the way. We simply wouldn't have had this time together, and this opportunity to see more of each others' personalities, if it weren't for the trip.

A number of readers have suggested that there is a book in this blog. I'm inclined to agree, if for no other reasons than a vanity on my part to think I might be able to write one, but also for the fact that the experience can be best understood and appreciated in retrospect, as a whole, rather than in this diary form. Writing the blog has helped me digest our experiences as we've travelled along, to untangle at least in an initial way, the many threads that were spun each day. To write a book, to see the entire 8 months from the more stable platform of so-called normal life, would be a way of securing the memories, and of giving the trip some enduring meaning for my family. Writing is one thing, and publishing another entirely. If anyone out there knows of or can recommend either a publisher or a literary agent that would be willing to take us on, please let me know.

Tonight over dinner in the beautiful and big-hearted city of Buenos Aires, the four of us toasted our trip and our return home. To those of you who have followed, once or regularly, especially to those who have commented or emailed; to those of you who helped make this trip possible with help or understanding; and to those of you who showed us hospitality along the way; I raise my glass and drink to your health.


(Picture taken in Lima, but as you might tell from my big red face, plenty of Pisco Sours were drunk to many healths).

Darwinism and Table Soccer

The seven hour bus trip from Santiago to La Serena was a piece of cake. We took a taxi to the terminal of Tur-Bus, and found there a level of organisation as good as any airport. Our tickets already specified the bay number that the bus would use. We bought some food for the trip and got settled in on board. No checkin, no security - and no delays.

The place that 'Nonna Carla' had chosen for us was outside the centre of the town, just by the beach. It's clearly not swimming weather right now, but the seafront made a good place to walk. I noticed a blue sign right by the water with a picture of a huge wave on it. On closer examination it turned out to be an indication for the escape route in case of a tsunami. Nothing is left to chance in La Serena - the sign pointed away from the ocean. Darwin, like God, is being relegated to ever smaller spheres of influence by modern man.

Our hotel was actually a park of cabañas - tiny self-catering cabins that are perfect for Summer, but definitely not made to retain heat. But we were fine with it. We were glad to be out of a smoggy city, and Nina and Sara soon found little friends around the park. For families based in Santiago, La Serena is the holiday destination of choice. The Winter school holidays are on right now, so the girls (and Letizia and I) were able to resume the sport that practically defined our week in Fiji: table soccer. In Fiji, I did my impression of Little Britain's Competitive Dad, doing a lap of the table on every goal, punching the air, and generally bewildering my young (and now that I think of it, slightly cross-eyed) opponent. And yet he kept coming back for more. Sucker!!! In La Serena I tried to suppress this instinct when playing Filipe, an 11-year-old Santiago boy. And I almost succeeded. In any case, we have decided that table-soccer (or tacataca as it is known in Chile) is the sport for the Lawlor family, combining as it does a minimal fitness requirement, no dedication whatsoever and a take-no-prisoners approach to gratuitous displays of victory. We'll be acquiring a table when we get home (though we have nowhere to put it, as the funds that might have gone into converting the attic went into this trip instead).

Across the road from our cabañas we found a great steak restaurant. For less than 7 euros I got one of the best filets I've ever enjoyed. 400g of rosey-on-the-inside, al-dente-on-the-outside happiness. Our waiter turned out to have a very unusual first name. He was called Darwin. I know that Charles Darwin passed this way before on The Beagle. But I didn't think he had left his own genetic imprint on the place. Could this man in front of me be the fruit of Charles Darwin's own long forgotten experiment in heredity, I wondered? Apparently not - it seems that his father was a scientist and named his son out of reverence for a great scientific thinker. (It might have been kinder to simply call him Charles). I was tempted to ask him what names his siblings were carrying around (Copernicus is working desserts tonight and it's Einstein's night off). But he still had all the steak-knives in his hand so I though better of it. I also didn't find out if he shared my concerns about the negative effect that the tsunami sign might have on the future of the local gene pool. Some times it's safer to be on the other side of a nice big language barrier.

La Serena has a great deal more to offer than steak and table soccer of course. We took some time to stroll around the city centre, browse in a pretty covered market, and have a reasonably priced meal or two. But oddly enough, table soccer and walks along the beach (including a few goes on a bungy trampoline for Nina and Sara) was all we really wanted. The girls had had to deal with 4 days in Santiago with very little to do except watch their parents disintegrate due to lack of sleep (probably not such a bad passtime for most kids, but not nearly as good if you can't have a laugh with your friends about it). La Serena offered them a chance to just do what they wanted to do. Apart from a quick tour of a surprisingly good archeological museum - which included an orginal maoi statue from Easter Island - we contented ourselves with strolling, eating, ping-pong and table soccer. As far as this family is concerned, La Serena was a GOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!



Nina and Sara, ready for the bus to get out of Santiago.

The Best Day So Far (Apparently)

"That was the best day of the trip so far" said Nina, with the typical exaggeration and amnesia of a nine-year-old. With so many UNESCO World Heritage sites under our belt, with Beijing, Sydney, Fraser Island and Fox Glacier still bearing 'Wet Paint' signs in my own mind, why in god's name did she choose Napier, pretty though it is, as The Best? You tell me.
Out of the various options Napier had to offer, Nina nad Sara chose the playground and Marine World. Letizia and I chose a self-guided tour of the Art Deco buildings, and the Earthquake Museum (Napier was flatted in 1935 by an 8.6 quake and subsequently rebuilt in an almost uniform Art Deco style).

The playground turned out to be what Italians call a 'pacco' - a waste of time, something that doesn't deliver on its promise. A disappointment. It was relatively new, wit a quirky design that looked well against the Art Deco backdrop of the town. But it was ill-concieved and badly maintained. The girls squeezed what they could from it, but left knowing that, given the glowing reports we had received, it should have been better.

They endured the Art Deco tour before falling gratefully upon Marine World, fuelled with stories of being able to hold penguins. These girls have fed wild dolphins in Tangalooma, and seen dozens of them surf the bow waves of the catamaran on Milford Sound. They've seen truely spectacular synchronized dolphin shows in the Gold Coast. Napier's Marine World, on the face of it, should have been a let down. But that same childhood amnesia and fixation with the here and now prevailed. They loved the tricks of the single, ancient dolphin called Kerry. And although they've seen fur seals in the wild on at least 3 occasions here in New Zealand, they still adored the pup that was taken for walkies around the thin Winter crown that lay scattered about the small poolside terraces. The half-hearted applause sounded like piss dribbling out of a bucket onto concrete, but that didn't diminish their enthusiasm. And at the end of the show, they did get to hold a penguin; a Little Blue called Alfred who was missing one eye and blind in the other. An admission-paying parent might mistake this for a 'pacco', and a pathetic one at that. But Nina and Sara, as they posed with the shivering bundle (penguins, the girls reminded me, shiver from warmth rather than cold) just felt how good the moment was.

We duely visited the museum where the girls remained unmoved by an old lady's filmed testimony of the earthquake, whereas I was close to tears. But they were just words from an old lady with a lot of makeup. Words are rarely enough for kids.

After our relatively busy day, we relaxed in the hostel for a few hours. I tried to read but failed; I was dragged to the pool table where my daughters found themselves in unquestionable need of help (this was their first time playing pool) but unwilling to properly accept it. "We'll just use our own rules, Daddy". When I challenged Letizia to a game, and discovered that it was also her first time, Nina and Sara looked on, in open-mouthed thrall of their father's consummate skill. I'm a below-average player of pool. Well below average. I should have been a 'pacco'. I know that I'm a 'pacco'.

We ate dinner in a Mongolian BBQ, where most appealing characteristic for the girls was the unlimited supply of icecream and soft drinks that came with the meal. Letizia and I are unashamed hard-asses when it comes to eating healthily, but every now and then we ignore our own rules. Afterwards, we walked back to the hostel joking about all the funny made-up words the girls used by mistake just a few years ago (they love stories about when they were younger). And this was the contented atmosphere in which Nina proclaimed this to be The Best Day So Far.

More often than not, I don't respond in the positive to my daughters' requests to play. I'm stuck in a book, talking to Letizia, or worse - working on this stupid blog. Too often, I am missing one eye, and blind in the other. But not today. Today I played pool, joined in, laughed - I might even have skipped at one point. I did enough today for my amnesiac daughters to forget the fact that their father is often something of a 'pacco', and they just felt how good the moment was.
If it's this easy, this inanely, embarassingly easy to make them happy, why the hell can't I manage to do it every day?

Selling up to travel

Just to put our own little trip into perspective, check out this family from Florida. They're selling the family home, and embarking on a round-the-world trip for a year with their three teenaged sons. The have a blog too, which I will definitely be subscribing to.

Walking on Water

We shouldn't be let mind a dog, never mind two children. The night before our planned excursion on Fox Glacier, Sara gave her unsolicited opinion on the food in Arthur's Pass in the direct and physical way that we are used to from the girl: she barfed it all back up before bedtime. It wasn't looking good for the hike. To make matters worse - much worse - the following morning as we got up early and started to prepare ourselves the same child pointed out, again in the most direct way possible, that her stomach was empty and her sugars were low, by fainting in the bathroom. She didn't black out, but she ended up on her arse, murmuring slowly to herself, until we set her on the bed and put her head between her knees. Really - if anyone feels like reporting us, I'd almost encourage them.

But it gets worse again. Sara recovered quickly, and protested our decision to call off the glacier trip. She insisted that she wanted to do the hike and that she was fine now. We weren't buying it but set off to Fox Glacier (half an hour's drive from Franz Josef) to see if we could get a refund of the $100 deposit. When we got there, and explained Sara's alternating puking and swooning, Malcolm our guide-to-be told us that she'd be fine (these Kiwis are as good as the Aussies at shrugging off illness, danger and common-sense).

So, responsible parents that we are, we continued to increase Sara's sugar levels using fruit sweets and juice, fitted herself and Nina out with boots, and got on the bus with the guides that led to the start of the trail.

What's a glacier anyway?, I hear you ask (admittedly over the noise of those baying for our children to be removed for their own safetly). It's a river, really, that moves 100,000 times slower than normal rivers. Instead of water, flows ice. Instead of a spring, there's a snow-collecting basin (called a neve) over 3000m up the mountain, where today's snow compacts yesterday's and eventually compresses it into ice. The ice flows downhill under its own weight, moving on a layer of water formed where the ice meets the underlying rock, but also moving internally, in a plastic flow. At the bottom of the glacier, the terminal, where the higher temperatures defeats the pressure, the ice finally melts and runs off as cloudy green streams.

The way you get up onto Fox Glacier is to start near the terminal of the glacier and hike for the best part of an hour along the mountainside - the bank of this river of ice - until you reach a point where it's safe (in the I-have-signed-a-waiver sense of the word) to move onto the glacier itself. To reach this point, we had to climb a fair bit, as well as move along a narrow trail at the edge of a bluff. This last fact might alarm American or Antipodean readers. That's because they know what the hell a bluff is. A bluff in European English is a clever card-playing pretence, and very little else. So when we were told in advance that we would be walking along a bluff, I thought it odd but not much odder than anything else I've been told by a guide in the last 5 months. Halfway along our hike to the edge of the ice, we found out what a New Zealander means by a bluff. A bluff, so far as I can now tell, is a f**king great cliff with a 100m drop. It has a path alongside whose width is very much economy class. And by way of support for those who might have fainted that morning there is a chain and a red-bearded, grinning guide. (Social services numbers are in the Government section of the phone book, if you haven't found it yet).

We survived, and not having been killed are of course stronger (big chunks of ice bring out the Nietzsche in me). Nina and Sara dealt with the heights like two little girls who know what it feels to zip along on a flying fox at 7 meters, and we all went on to have a surreal and rewarding experience walking on top of a glacier for 90 minutes or so.

When we got to the edge of the glacier, we were handed poles, and told to put on our instep crampons. And then we walked on water. We stepped onto 12km of frozen but moving water. The surface was broken in a thousand different ways. Where it met the mountainside, it thrust upwards, trying to burst its banks. The centre of the flow moves faster than the edges, creating crevasses whose depths are disguised by the pools of water that fill them. We were walking in the melt zone of the glacier, where the liquid flow created other perfect imperfections on the icescape - archways, circular pools and waterfalls. From the mountain, the uppermost surface of the glacier is undulating but looks smooth. Up close, it is anything but. The ice looks like a snapshot of the choppy surface of a lake on a windy day.

On any trip, there are inevitably things that you wish you had kept your wallet closed for. You're probably glad you did them but you wished you didn't have to pay so much for it. We spent less than 100 euro in the backpackers in Franz Josef, and a little over 100 euros for the half-day trip on the Fox glacier. It was one of the best value highs we've had on the trip so far. If you come here with kids, be aware that there is practically nothing else to do in either Franz Josef or Fox Glacier. The evening activity is limited to going to the pub, and apparently they get quite boisterous. Our irresponsibility as parents doesn't extend to finding out in person.

Honest!!

Traveling with Kids: A New Website for Parents

For Irish readers, I'd like to point you at a website that has just launched. It's called Sticky Fingers Travel and is dedicated to those who know, or who are willing to discover, that having kids is no obstacle to real travel. It's worth checking out, and preferably signing up, and becoming part of this new community.

Campervan: Epilogue

When we first climbed aboard the campervan a few days previously, I had two concerns:
1) Would the whole thing topple over on a sharp turn; and
2) Would the campervan turn into a bloodbath on wheels - the kind of Lord of the Flies scenario that Manchán Magan was hinting at a few weeks back.

Before:




After:



In retrospect, we were inviting disaster. The four of us are used to being in close quarters, but it's an entirely different proposition to invite a fifth person, even if they are family, to suffer the inevitably claustrophobic atmosphere of a young family. Giovanna was taking a big risk of finishing her break in New Zealand on a bum note.

The thing about campervans is that although they look impossibly unstable, they are built to hold together in the tightest corners - as long as you take it nice and easy. And family is pretty much the same - it tends to work even in the most demanding situations. You just have to slow things down and take your time. We didn't topple over - there wasn't even a moment of worry. We managed to have an excellent campervan experience, memories that will last us a lifetime, and one very happy zia Giovanna. I think we did it just by avoiding stressful timetables and activities, by loosening the rules a little, and by having a laugh whenever possible.

The drive back from Hanmer Springs was very easy. We stopped off once more at our local freewifi point, stopped in Waikari to pay due respect to Giovanna's Dunny (see below), and drove into Christchurch dancing around the campervan to the sounds of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.



Unfortunately the next day we had to say goodbye to Giovanna. It seemed impossible to accept that a month had gone by so quickly, and that we had gone from six to four in a matter of days. I personally wasn't prepared for how bad it felt to lose Duncan and then Gio'. Again, the speed that time is passing by continues to amaze me, and that was part of the problem. I felt very down for a full day, and poor Nina ended in tears at the end of the day, thinking about Giovanna.

But we're up and running again now. We've been taking it easy, saving time and money (thanks to the home swap) here in Christchurch, but we've already ben thinking and planning ahead. Later in the week we'll head to the one remaining part of the South Island that we haven't seen yet, the We(s)t Coast, including Franz Josef glacier and Pancake Rocks. Then one week later, we'll finally be heading north to Wellington to begin our 4 weeks adventures in the North Island. We've also found accommodation in Fiji for our 'week out' between NZ and South America (and for slightly under budget!) And we've finally started thinking about how to divide our time in South America (about time I guess).

There's a lot still ahead of us. From here on in we're on our own. I think we'll be OK.

What's a traveling family's favourite berry?

The lie-berry of course (pronounciation courtesy of Sara).

The Christchurch library near us is the business. As well as a fantastic selection of books, a huge upper limit on how many books they can take out, and DVDs as well, it's a cool place to hang out. There are playstations for rent, computers to access for free and listening posts for music. And there are green beanbags every where for you to lie on. That must be where it gets its name from.

Playgrounds

There's a little playground down the road from where we're staying in Christchurch. Nothing new there - there's a little playground down the road in Carrigaline, Cork, the place we call home. I've taken Nina and Sara to the local playground here a number of times in the last 2 weeks. Their favourite ride there is a tyre suspended horizontally from three chains in such a way that it can not only swing, but also spin. Nothing could be simpler.

As far as I can tell, it's their favourite ride firstly because they never quite know what direction it's going to swing or spin in next, because their Daddy is an unpredictable pusher. It might just swing when they thought it would spin, or the other way around.

The other reason I think it's their favourite is because that's the one where I have to participate. They get quality Daddy time, and it's clear that I'm enjoying myself as much as they are. That's the difference. I'm not in a hurry to be somewhere else. It's a simple pleasure that happens more often on the road than it does at home.

In most other respects, life with the kids is just like home. I have to correct them, and sometimes I'm not as patient and understanding as they need me to be. I still have to say things three or four times before they listen to me. We still fall out for short periods of time.

But the counter-balance, the moments when we're just OK being with each other and talking (with Sara this is a kind of one-way download from her to me where I have to work hard to identify the message buried within the verbosity; with Nina it's almost the opposite where I have to interpolate the few words into the idea that she roughly sketches; in both cases it requires me to shut up and listen), are more numerous than at home. I would have paid the tickets for this alone.

Traveling in Cars with Girls

Nina and Sara have been mixing Enid Blyton with JK Rowling over the trip (with an assortment of other good books that we find along the way - Nina is currently reading Maori legends - thanks Ian!). They are reading Famous Five and Secret Seven from Blyton - she still manages to win young readers all this time later. And it does have some entertaining results:

As we march them up yet another bleedin' hill somewhere, just to see what it looks like from the top, they can imagine themselves on Kirrin Island, dealing with some combination of smugglers or spies.

The discovery of Ginger Beer first in print and then in reality (Bundaberg Ginger Beer is readily available all over Queensland) was a big hit. They loved the idea of being able to taste what fuelled the adventures of Julian, Dick, Anne, George - and presumably Timmy the Dog. Unfortunately the novelty couldn't mask the sad fact that they just didn't like the taste so much. Another few months on 'Kirrin Island' should sort that out.

Sara has always had very clear speech - at least we have always been able to clearly make out her words even if, when assembled, they don't always make a lot of sense. Now in addition to precise diction, under the influence of the Famous Five she regularly talks about things being 'quite astonishing' or 'rather exciting'. This sounds odd from a 7-year-old with an Italian mother and an Irish accent.

We've clocked up 1600 km in the last week - it'll be 2000km when we return to Christchurch tomorrow. That's a lot of time for two young girls to stay in a car, so I'll explain how they manage to keep sane. The basic tools of the trade are books and Nintendos DSs. The latter can be overdone (Nina has been seen in the back with a fleece over her head to prevent reflections on her screen - while we drive past some of the most spectacular scenery NZ has to offer), but thankfully batteries tend to wear out so they are forced into a bit of variety. Every now and then we have to intervene and get the girls to engage with their surroundings. No magic going on here - just the usual combination of cajoling and bossing, trying to help them make something personal out of what they are seeing. Nina, for example, loves to get her hands on the camera. Thank goodness for digital photography - she can snap away as much as she wants (ish) and often sees things that we miss.

All of this requires regular stops of course, and that's an important factor. Except for rare occasions when we really have to make point B by a specific time, we take most photo opportunities that present themselves. And here, there is one around each corner. We also use a technique that has been known for a generation in one family (as it is now in ours) as an 'Irene's Safari' (thanks Ludi!). More often than not we take at least one packed lunch - or the ingredients thereof - in the car with us. The weather here has been very kind, and we've had more than one lunch out of the boot of the car. Somehow it's just more fun (and saves a lot of money over even a short amount of time) than stopping in one cafe after another.

When all else fails - and only when all else fails - we resort to singing. Sara specializes in tear-jerkers from Annie the Musical. Nina gives vent to her attitude by belting out Skaterboy by Avril Lavigne. I join in both, in an exaggerated operatic voice. But only in order to bring proceedings to a close. Works every time.

Queenstown Part I

Our new dynamic is very interesting. Letizia and Giovanna take turns at sitting up front, and both of them have their guide books open. Letizia has the book of lies, Giovanna has a french guide. They cross-check accommodation, restaurants and activities for the next stop on the Magical Mystery Tour. Nina and Sara, as ever, divide their attention between books, Nintendo DSs and the scenery. My job, apart from driving and navigation, is to occasionally bore the crap out of everyone by delivering historical sermons based on whatever I've been reading recently on New Zealand. I take this job seriously, and so try to maintain a kind of plummy, condescending tone. Don't feel so smug - it'll be your turn next.

The stop-off in Lake Tekapo was just intended to break up the journey from Christchurch to Queenstown, but it was worth the trip. The lake view from our motel included a backdrop of mountain peaks, recently coated with light snowfall. Down the road from us was a tiny little stone chapel whose alter was backed by a large window that looked out onto the lake. Guidebooks informed us that the perspective on the lake from that window was unique, but the church was in use during our visit. So we, and all the other visitors to the lake that evening, had to make do with the infinity of other unique perspectives on the lake that were on offer. I found the fixation with the church quite odd. The was a concentration of tourist buses which parked outside this little chapel - which really was no bigger than a motel bedroom - so that visitors could pile into a little stone hut and look out on a lake which, if they would just come back out of the stone hut, they would see just as well and without any obstruction (other than that of the little stone hut itself).

We reached Queenstown on day 2, in the darkness, after a relaxed drive that included many stops for photo opportunities. It seemed that around every corner was a different country, and Letizia and Giovanna were kept busy. As ever, on Letizia's blog you'll see plenty of excellent photos of where we've been, and if you read italian (or indeed use Google's site translation service) you'll be able to follow here unique perspective on our trip (without having to file into a little stone church). At this point I have to confess, that whatever the results of the poll on Kiwi extreme activities might result in, we're likely to just go ahead and do (or not do) our own thing. So which Jet Boating is coming in last on the poll, that's what we did first. Not just Jet Boating, but a day trip that took us out to Glenorchy (West of Queenstown and on the same lake), included a 4wd drive to a nearby forest, a short guided walk through that forest, and then a jetboat run up and back down the Dart River. It was money very well spent. Apart from the fact that it was a group activity, we also learned a lot of interesting things as we went along.

The forest that we visited includes a tree called the Red Beech which has some interesting behaviour (if a tree can be said to exhibit behaviour). There's very little topsoil around Glenorchy, and competition between trees can be fierce. The forest has a high and full canopy so the only chance for young trees to stake their own claim is when an older tree falls and leaves a gap up there. The saplings then have to grow upwards like crazy, with no thought for stability, in order to be first to reach the sun. Only when they get there do they start to put on a bit of weight - new growth takes place around the thin girth of the successful sapling. Because it grows from the inside, it also dies from the inside. Old trees are completely hollow all the way up their lengths by the time they finally expire. A byproduct of this race is the saplings ability to stay young and small for years, keeping its powder dry until that vital gap opens up. There have been examples of little 'saplings' that are more than 50 years old.

Part of the bushwalk included a vist to a mocked up Maori encampment, where we were shown a thing or two about bushcraft. One thing that caught my attention was a trick for moving fire embers from one camp to another (saves on lighter fluid I guess). A kind of large fungus (about the same shape and dimensions as a casserole dish) that grows on the sides of trees was buried under the campfire. In the morning it was dug up and was cold enough to handle. But when making camp again that evening, the Maori would break open the fungus where the ember of the previous night's heat still glowed. Some clever bugger figured that one out a long time ago.

We left the forest and drove across the river bed to where the jetboat was waiting to knock all that education out of us. We were able to drive across, as the rivers in these parts are of a type known as braided river systems (only found in NZ, Australia and another country whose name got dislodged from my memory during the subsequent jetboat ride). Again, because of the poor topsoil, the rivers here spread themselves wide rather than digging in. They rise after rainfall, but when the levels fall away again, the river settles down each time into different channels through the mostly dry river bed. The name 'braided' is a good way to describe the visual effect: a stone and gravel strip with rivulets of water weaving back and forth across the its width. The water in places is only ankle deep - but that's all a jetboat needs. Invented in New Zealand not as an extreme sport but as a way for landowners to navigate otherwise unnavigable rivers, they are simple but clever machines. There are no outer propellers. The titanium hull has a water inlet facing forwards and a directable nozzle facing back. Water is sucked from one point to the other at a rate of hundreds of litres a second, creating an extremely directional propulsive force. A picture or two demonstrates the effect of being on board for an hour and a half.








We chilled out, and dined out, in Queenstown that evening, but only after an hour spent watching people throw themselves off a bridge just outside the town. Some decisions had to be made. Would Letizia jump?

More soon.

And Then There Were 5

We're on a magical mystery tour at the moment. Giovanna joined us in Christchurch and after an Olympian effort to overcome jetlag, we went on the road 2 days later. So far we've been to Lake Tekapo, Queenstown, Te Anau, Milford Sound and we're now in Invercargill. The plan is being made as we go along - something that I'm particularly enjoying.

For such a relatively small country (compared to where we've just come from) New Zealand looks very big. The mountains and plains go on and on, and around every corner there's a different landscape. The mountainous centre of the South Island is completely different to the coast - the latter looking very much like the UK and Ireland. The scale of the Southern Alps is immense. If you want to feel small, come to New Zealand.

Lake Tekapo was a half-way stop on the way to Queenstown, but a good one. And the road that leads from it to Queenstown is a spectacular collection of turquoise lakes, shadowy passes and snowdusted mountains. You can tell you're getting closer to Queenstown because the traffic (what little of it there might be) speeds up. Queenstown is the adrenalin-soaked heart of the area, fuelled by bungy, whitewater, jetboating, skydiving and much else, and it seems to siphon in tourists and spit them out at high speed on the arterial roads that lie on either side. We indulged in a little extreme activity - more on that in a Queenstown post - and two days later we were on the road again. This time to Milford Sound.

I'm getting into blog-debt. I can't do Milford Sound justice without dedicating a post specifically to it. For now, let me say that it was a 300 km trip from Queenstown to Milford Sound, for a 3-hour tour of the waters there. And it was worth every kilometer. That was yesterday. We finished up the day in Milford with a 300km dash to Invercargill (the route brought us close enough to Queenstown again to slingshot off it's heighted energy and reach the South coast). Here, we're positioned for a run along the Southern Scenic Drive (Catlins Coast) to Dunedin, with the option of stopping off overnight if we find something that interests us enough (and weather to enjoy it in - so far we've been extremely lucky on that count).

The dynamic of our group has changed, slightly and effortlessly, with the arrival of Zia Giovanna. This is a group that has worked well in Ireland, Italy and France, so it's no surprise that we get on so well this far from home. As well as being so popular with Nina and Sara, Gio adds two extra camera lenses to the group. Watch here for some of the results (when we get back to Christchurch.

Birthdays on the road

We flew into Christchurch by night, declared the red Uluru dust still on our boots, and grabbed a taxi to our new home. We've swapped house for the next 4-6 weeks or so with Ray and Louise who are now settling in to our house back in Cork. The house here is terrific. It's 10 minutes easy drive from the centre of the city, and situated on the slopes to the south of Christchurch that mark the beginnings of the volcanic Banks Peninsula. The view from the window that first night was of a perfectly flat landscape below us, lit up into the distance.

When we woke the next morning to a clear blue sky, we could see the real view. That flat landscape we had seen is called the Canterbury Plains and it stretched in front of us, half way across the South Island, till it hit the Southern Alps. The contrast between the steady plains and the dramatic peaks gives a hint about what life is like here, especially for visitors. Christchurch is known as the most English of NZ cities. The beautifully laid out streets and the tranquility of the parklands give order to the meandering river that runs through it. The river is slow-moving and has been further tamed with the very reassuring name of Avon. But at the heart of the city, in the i-Site information office on Cathedral Square, you can book sky diving, white water rafting, zorbing (I'm particularly partial to this idea) , bungee jumping, ballooning, hang-gliding, skiing and other adrenalin-soaked activities that seem to have nothing to do with Christchurch's mellow setting.

It seems as though Kiwis are compensating for a lack of the lethal beasties and bities that Australia offered, by providing man-made routes to premature death or serious injury. Naturally we will be taking up New Zealand's offer on this. It would be rude not to really.

We have in fact already started. We started the days celebrations (Nina's 9th birthday) in a place called Adrenalin Forest. Here, for a very reasonable NZ$95 (47 euros) for the entire family, we strapped on some harnesses and spent 2 hours battling with our fears of height in an obstacle course that ran (for us) up to 6 metres from the forest floor, but could go to 17 meters for adults. The course included flying foxes where you clip yourself to a cable, leave go and think about how you're going to cope with the impact of the fast approaching tree. It wasn't easy for us, never mind the girls, and Nina and Sara had to really work through their fears (while Letizia and I tried unsuccessfully to mask ours) in order to complete the course. Let's just say that Nina had to prove today that she was a big 9-year-old. And she surely did.


Where are the brakes?!?


Trust me Sara - I'm an engineer!


After that heart-pounding start to the day we decided to try a more traditional route to cardiovascular trauma by having lunch in McDonalds. As with the Adrenalin Forest event, we were joined by Simon, Leah and Caitlin (yes - our Brisbane hosts. I really will have to explain in a post soon how it is that this long-suffering family managed to find themselves yet again surrounded by Lawlors). We had a quorum to convene a birthday party, complete with chocolate cake and candles, and of course pressies. Nina made her annual pronouncement that this was the best birthday like ever. We rounded off the day with was was supposed to be a nice quiet movie but as it turned out, The Spiderwick Chronicles probably bruised whatever heart muscle escaped the first two activities.



Over the next few weeks we'll have to make some decisions about what kind of activities we are most interested in. As ever, the budget is limited, and we have no desire to blow it out again like we did in Australia. So if anyone out there has any opinions on which extreme Kiwi adventures we should absolutely not miss out on, then please drop a comment and let us know. I feel another poll coming on...

Uncool

It's a sin against nature for a child above a certain age to believe that their parents are cool, even worse to openly declare this belief. So imagine my concern when Nina (8-about-to-be-9, and therefore well past aforementioned certain age) suggested a few weeks ago that she had cool parents. When I challenged her on this she insisted somewhat impatiently: "Sure you're cool. You're taking us around the world, aren't you?".

This is a worry.

I had it all planned out - or at least confidently predicted - shortly after she was born. Nina has a software engineer for a dad, a doctor of law and stay-at-home mamma, but her Italian aunt Giovanna lives in Paris and moves between fashion/art photography to dealing in antiques without visible effort. It's her job to be cool. It's her job to be right where Letizia and I are wrong, and provide for the you just don't understand me like Giovanna does (slam!!!) moments. And of course when Nina is old enough, it'll be to Gio that Nina will go on holidays, and certainly not anywhere with her parents.

So this new-found coolness of ours is upsetting everything. And it is new-found, by the way. Before we left Ireland last December, if you had asked Nina about whether she was excited about the trip, she would have said "not really". She wanted to stay with her friends, and her cousins, and of course her classmates. Was there anything she was looking forward too? The Great Wall of China? The Great Barrier Reef? The Big (if not indeed also Great) Pineapple of Woombye? Nope. But if you caught her in one of her more adventurous moods, she would confess a certain curiosity for a pair of cats in Christchurch, New Zealand. You see the first leg of our New Zealand trip was to be a house-swap (arranged through HomeForExchange) with a English/Kiwi couple called Ray and Louise. An optional part of this swap included the company of Satie and Willard, the resident cats. So in a nutshell, Nina was begrudgingly allowing us to take her and her sister to 8 new countries, across 3 continents and 2 hemispheres, on a trail littered with World Heritage listings, diverse cultures and climates, stocked with a zoological cornucopia of exotica, on condition she could make friends with a pair of antipodean moggies.

Now this is the kind of infuriating, illogical, and downright ungrateful behaviour that I am most comfortable with. This was child-parent communication in a language I could understand. Then it all went horribly, horribly wrong: As the trip began, so both Nina and Sara began to enjoy it.

As the fog of jet lag cleared in Beijing, they got into their stride. It was hard for them not to love the pandas in Chengdu, or the sweet treats in Xi'an. But they also developed a taste for the Shanghai marketplace haggling and the strangeness of Chinese buildings. And they were seeing things with minds much less tainted by the false familiarity of TV documentaries than we were. When we reached Australia, where they could actively engage with their surroundings thanks to the language, where we weren't moving at such a frenetic pace, and where we were meeting many new (to them) friends, things kicked up a notch. They couldn't bear to leave Sydney, or then Melbourne, then they didn't want to move on from Cairns, and finally they didn't want to say goodbye to Simon, Leah and Caitlin in Brisbane (they didn't as it happened - more on that in a later blog entry). And somewhere in those 12 Aussie weeks, Nina used the c-word against me: Cool, she said. And she meant it.

Cool doesn't sit well with me. Cool leads to teenage conversations that start with what a great dad I am and end with car keys getting handed over. I've never been cool, and so I'm entirely unsure how to manage it, and if I get used to being cool then I'm sure I'll start worrying about losing the status (by not handing over car keys or similar acts of willful parental spite).

But I'm playing the long game. I'm quietly optimistic that it won't last, that it's a temporary aberration that time and continued exposure to 'daddy humour' will heal. There are indications of a return to normality. As I write this, Nina and Sara are fast asleep here in Christchurch, with Willard purring gently at the bottom of their bed, and Willard and Satie have proved themselves to be as big a highlight of the trip as anticipated. Tomorrow Nina turns 9 and Sara has just turned 7 (every year brings us closer to the very uncool parents years). And in two short days, Zia Giovanna flies in from Paris.

Cool doesn't stand a chance.

Melbourne

After 5 weeks in Sydney, and a palate-cleansing four days on the road, it was time to taste the delights of Melbourne. Comparisons are odious, but so is this blog, so I'm not going to avoid comparing the two cities. But before I do, let me point out how wildly inaccurate any of my conclusions are bound to be. (You probably knew that though.) We were to spend a paltry 5 days in Melbourne, we were mostly interested in catching up with our friends Jamie and Francesca (who also kindly hosted us for the duration of our stay, and for whom those 5 days must have been anything but paltry - thanks again guys) rather than 'doing' Melbourne. I also had the pleasure of catching up with my first cousin Carol, her husband Andy and daughter Jasmine. And on top of that, we also had the undiluted pleasure of Darragh Ballesty's company, and his friend Caroline. What I'm trying to say is that our stay was all about meeting friends, and Melbourne in a sense was merely the backdrop.

The city feels entirely different to Sydney and simply doesn't make that kind of instant emotional impact we experienced in Circular Quay. How could it? There may be no other city on the planet capable of that effect. I am told by those who should know (and whom I unquestioningly believe) that you need to live in Melbourne to appreciate it. It offers a different pace of life to Sydney, but at the same time a higher percentage of cultural and artistic activities. To me, it seemed much more like a town with a British identity. The St. Kilda sorts the kind of pier you'd expect to find in Blackpool or Brighton (and not the Brighton located a few km south in Melbourne itself).

Walking around the city centre, near Federation Square and Collins Street, the difference with Sydney is clear. The people are whiter, the pretty buildings are prettier, (the ugly buildings are uglier), the streets are narrower and more intimate. Cafes are tucked into the even narrower alleyways, so you never quite know what you are going to see next: A jazz band, a street performer, another ethnic eatery (Melbourne's cuisine is reputed to be the best in the Southern Hemisphere). Trams move up and down the streets - as opposed to Sydney's trannys - some of them old and beautiful, others modern and menacing (the trams, not the trannys).

I had heard about Melbournes megalomaniac trams, that brook no resistence and take no prisoners from cars or pedestrians. Their absolute priority at some junctions has led to strange right-hand turn rules for cars. In Oz, you drive on the left, but instead of waiting on the innermost lane to turn right, you pull all the way over to the left, leaving space for the dreaded trams, until the traffic lights allow you to complete your manoevre. The detail that I was missing was that the signal to complete the righthand turn is the amber light. This means that if you are going straight on through a Melbourne traffic light, you better not do it on amber. I got a brake-screeching, heart-flopping lesson in Melbourne's rules of the road on our first day. Our rental car had Queensland plates - I think I haven't done the reputation of that state any favours.

We were based in Albert Park, a city suburb named for its principal feature: the public park that once a year plays host to the F1 Grand Prix (this weekend in fact). I never did get to drive the course in my rented Hyundai Elantra (where do they come UP with these car names!!?) but I did walk across it on the way to the playground with the kids. If you had asked me ten years ago, I would have given you very long odds indeed on such a reversal of priorities.

Jamie and Francesca's house is located on a street that has everything they need: park, school, shops, cafes. In this regard, life in Melbourne is very much like that in Sydney - people tend to stick to their own village. J&F can't go beyond the front door without meeting people they know. Walking from their front door to the bottleshop (off-license) and back with Jamie, I felt I had been caught up in a scene from West Wing. Characters came in from the left, words were exchanged on the hoof, then exit, stage right. All we were missing was a steadi-cam operator in front of us - and probably, let's face it Jamie, a sharper dialogue ;-)

Like Sydney - and Canberra - Melbourne has a lot of excellent museums. Regular readers of this blog might think that we - especially the children - have had our fill of museums, but nothing could be further from the truth. The quality and variety of museums here is very high, but the cost is low, in some cases zero. In a county like Ireland, with a wealth of social and natural history behind it, and hopefully a future tied to high technology in front of it, there really should be a lot of public money put into creating environments like these. Especially for kids.

In Cork, there is one small science museum, and a new observatory museum in Blackrock. But there are a dozen or more indoor playgrounds which dwarf these museums. On a rainy day, wouldn't it be wonderful to check out an undiscovered corner of a museum as a viable alternative to a playground? The entry price of Aussie - and especially Melbournian - museums makes this possible. Kids get in for free in many places, and adults pay just 6 australian dollars (4 euros). A museum, which despite the name can be an exciting place for kids if built and run properly, can inspire researchers of the future.

We left Melbourne on a Monday morning, the first Monday of March (have we really been on the road since December!?) and headed back to Sydney, this time via the coastal route of Princes Highway. It would take 3 nights to get to Sydney where we would get to spend one last evening before heading to Queensland.

Annnnnd cut!

After 5 weeks of a stability of sorts, this morning we move on from Sydney. We're heading for Melbourne, but stopping off in Canberra, the Snowy Mountains, and Rutherglen along the way.

Sydney is a terrific city that we leave with regret - especially for our friends here. I'll write a post later on to try to cover our experience of the place - not an easy thing to do given the many different Sydneys there are.

Nina and Sara are excited about the fact that we have our own car (AUS$500 for 2 weeks from Apollo Car Rentals) - me too a little, though I really enjoyed using a reliable bus service while we were here. Nina, when she saw her mother packing our bags again, asked what was going on, forgetting that we were on a bigger trip. She and her sister really do take things one day at a time (when Gary asked her last night what she was looking forward to, she relied 'having a swim in the pool' - the one here at our Randwick apartment).

Yesterday evening we drove through the city, listening to the CDs that Ludi lent us for the road. There was something odd about watching Sydney pass by, all dressed up for Friday night, with our music as a backing track. Odd, but familiar. The it clicked: it felt like the closing credits of a film.

China and Australia: Budgeting Accomodation and Transport with Kids

if you plan to travel to either China or Australia with children, you'll find both places very accomodating, but in different ways. It's worth understanding these differences up front, to help with your budget.

In China, the only places where we each of us got a bed to ourselves was the train to Xi'an and the boat on the Yangtze. In very other case, if you have more than one child, and don't want two rooms, you'll end up putting one of them in the extra bed (for which you'll pay something like 20% on top of the room rate) and the other (or others!) into the double bed with you. Very romantic. The alternative of two rooms means moving up the price bracket. For us it wasn't an option.

Very many attractions in China have a reduced rate, or no fee at all, for children under 1.2 meters. It's odd, and seems arbitrary, but it's almost universally applied. Universally, but not rigourously. Although Sara is a shade over 1.2 meters, she always got whatever discount was on offer. On one occasions she was going to be charged full price but when I pushed, even a little, the cashier conceded. All these rebates add up, expecially when you consider that over 1.2 meters pays the full adult price.

One place this height policy did not apply was in the underground/subway trains. In Beijing we all paid the 2 RMB and in Shanghai we had to pay 4 each. So for many trips, with four of us, it made more economic sense to take a taxi, where the minimum fare was 11 RMB but for most central destinations didn't rise much beyond that. But be aware that if you have more than 2 kids, you and your luggage will not fit into most taxis. There were a lot of scalpers trying to sell us van trips to our hotel at Shanghai's Hongqiao airport, and they tried to convince us that we would not fit into a taxi. By ignoring them, we saved ourselves a bill that would have been 4 times the taxi fare. if you don't want to separate into two taxis, and you don't want to line the pockets of those van operators working the airports, organize a pickup with your hotel. The price will be more reasonable than anything you can get in situ.

In Sydney so far, the experience has been in line with European expectations. Based on age, you will get a discount on admission to many attractions and museums. Family tickets typically cover parents and 2 kids, so if you have more, you're going to have to dig a little deeper.

Again, public transport is the exception to the rule, but in this case, a positive one. If you are travelling with your children by Sydney bus, train or ferry, you pay half for your first child, and nothing at all for any others (you hear that Tim!?) We pay for weekly travel tickets that cover everything we need - and the bus coverage in particular is excellent - at a cost of AU$87.50 (about 50 euro).

Home Schooling on the Move

It was Sunday night. The girls were already tucked into their pull-out sofa bed, but not yet asleep.

"Tomorrow's Monday", I whispered to Sara after kissing her Goodnight.

"Yes", she replied sleepily, "That means lessons".

Lessons are the hour-long exercises in Maths or English that we do on weekday mornings, but sometimes allow ourselves to skip. Everything else can be learned in the museum/zoo/gallery/shop/street.

Letizia picked up some advice about home schooling: on any given day, ask the kids what they'd like to do. When they ask for Maths, we take out their workbooks that we brought along and see how they cope. If something new turns up that appears to create confusion then we might need to work on that. If they want to do English lessons, then we get them to work on a blog entry. This entails a rough draft, just to get ideas out on to paper. We don't care too much about spelling or neatness of writing until the second draft. In the background, every day they are reading from Enid Blyton or JK Rowling.

This is the routine we have settled into since our arrival in Sydney (the spells on the road are more ad hoc) and it seems to be working out. if anyone else out there (including Nina and Sara's teachers) hae any advice, we'd love to hear it.

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