Most of our holidays in the recent past have been entrusted to tour operators who plan on early departures each morning to ensure that in the process of going from point A to point B, we get to see everything from C to Z as well — whether we want to or not.
This year, our vacation was not going to be like that, we decided.
We were venturing into the Southern Hemisphere for the first time and our sole intention was to meet family and friends — so we were not going to rush anywhere. Instead, we would relax and spend as much time as possible in getting to know the new members of the family and catching up on old memories with the others.
Therefore, we would not actively seek out any place and put pressure on anyone to make sure we got there. Not for us Ayers Rock and the Great Barrier Reef, Milford Sound and the TranzAlpine Railway. We would go where our people were and if, as we made our way from one dearly loved person to another, we happened to catch sight of some of the sites we had read about in our geography books from our schooldays, we would consider it a bonus.
Naturally, seeing our friends and family in their home environment was thrilling. We exclaimed over their charming houses, peered out at the night sky to seek out the Southern Cross and then settled down in their kitchens with tea/coffee.
Excitement enough, we thought.
But our hosts didn’t.
“You haven’t come to the other side of the world to confine yourselves to the kitchen,” they said, as they awakened us at an unearthly hour even by local standards (making it sometime in the middle of the night for us, who were jet-lagged and behind them by five-seven hours). “Time to catch the sunrise over Moreton Bay / Bondi Beach / Lake Ginninderra / Mount Eden.”
Bewildered, befuddled and only half awake, we stumbled along obediently, sure that once we had admired the view, we would be back ‘home’ for a leisurely breakfast and more friendly chatter.
But it was not to be. “We want to show you as much of the country as we can,” our hosts enthused, “and if we leave the house when most of the day is over, you’ll never get to the Sunshine Coast/the Gold Coast/Rotorua/The Twelve Apostles ...
“We came to see you,” we remonstrated, but they were not listening.
And thus, we raced from one place to another, leaving out nothing en route: From pristine beaches to peaceful bays, from rainforest to woodlands, from ocean roads to winding hill lanes, from hot springs to dormant volcanoes. We were treated to every natural delight possible — and what’s more, we had delightful companions to share each wonder with.
We passed or lingered in dozens of typical British-sounding suburbs and towns like Newcastle, Richmond, Liverpool and Devonport — and then there were places whose names lingered long after we had passed them: Woolloomooloo, Wollongong, Illawarra, Katoomba, Gundagai, Murrumbidgee, Whakarewarewa, Matamata, Rangitoto, Takapuna, Puhinui, Papatoetoe ... We tossed the syllables around in our heads and said them aloud, sometimes with hilarious results.
But those sing-song aboriginal and Maori names refused to be forgotten and we continued to roll them off our tongues and savour them. For our hosts, they were mundane and easy-to-rattle-off — not magical and musical, as they were for us.
Maybe they would rather experiment with the sound of some of our Indian tongue-twisting names, we thought.
And right there in the midst of a surfeit of beaches and bays and beautiful names, we began to plan outings for them in India — perhaps to Lunglei, Cherrapunji, Mawsynram, Alappuzha, Shravanabelagola, Chikaldhara, Nallamala, Patancheru, Udhagamandalam ...?
Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.
