A road in the Australian Outback
If you were born in the age of the motor car, and anyone alive today has been, then you have travelled much further than your ancestors who were born earlier than the nineteen hundreds. Before the car was invented, ground transport relied on horses and horse drawn carriages or trains. If you travelled by train you had be going on a pretty specific journey and if by horse, or horse and carriage, you weren't likely to be taking scenic detours but going somewhere for a purpose.
Because of this modern humans have clocked up a lot more distance than our predecessors. I was brought home from hospital (I wasn't a home birth) in a car and, for me, a car has been something I have loved and appreciated since I can remember. They have taken me on some wonderful journeys, to events and given me access to places I needed to go.
Let's face it, any good invention comes with it's downside. That's the case for most things in life but for now let's consider the benefits of the car.
Life was once urban or provincial. Suburbs began to spring up in the mid nineteenth century around cities that became overcrowded. In London a catalyst for suburban growth was the opening of the Metropolitan Railway in the 1860's. At that time London was the largest city in the world. By the 1950's, when the motor car became affordable to normal families and the US Interstate Highway was built, suburbs fanned out around cities in that country.
Australia, with its massive size and tiny population relative to the US had still, by the 1950's, managed to link its far flung major cities with roads and, by the time I was born in 1952, suburbs had spread out far and wide from city centres . By the time I was seven my family and I had made a long journey by road from Sydney south to Melbourne then Adelaide on sealed roads. We then put the car on a train, the famous Ghan, and travelled north to Alice Springs. I don't think the road between those two cities was sealed until the 1980's. After that we drove further north to Darwin and from there eastwards to Cairns and then back to Sydney. It was without doubt the best trip of my life even though I have since travelled many places overseas.
My first memories of being driven are of excursions to the local shops with my mother and to school. In those days we didn't have seat belts and I remember many a time when, if Mum had to brake suddenly, she would fling her arm across me to hold me back. Years later when seat belts arrived, she would still do it by habit. There was also the time before indicators became fitted to cars that I remember her making hand signals to stop or turn. I loved it when, after my parents had visited friends, we would drive home at night and I would fall asleep in the back seat. Once home, my father would carry me into bed. I so loved this that when I got older and woke as we arrived home, I would fake being asleep so I could be carried to bed. Sadly Dad grew tired of this as I grew heavier and I would have to walk.
Once I was seven and left the local school some three kilometers from home, my mother would drive me to a primary convent school at Avalon on Sydney's Northern Beaches. The journey was about ten kilometers and the last two were around some spectacular but winding roads on headlands around the beaches. While I just sat and enjoyed the view and the time with my mother she did not enjoy it although she was very sweet about it for the three years I remained at the school,. She had to drive me as there was no bus and then drive home and repeat the exercise in reverse in the afternoon. She didn't do paid work so this, as such, was her job among her other housewifely duties. Mum was an excellent driver even if she didn't like being my chauffeur.
Living so far up the North Shore from Sydney city as we did, a car was a necessity. The train lines were further inland than the beach suburbs and the bus journey to the city was a long trip. On Sunday's my father and I would go to church and when we returned home he would stop the car at the base of our long, steep driveway so that I could drive up it. I was twelve by this stage and it was my introduction to driving.
Also at this age I was sent to a school in the Eastern suburbs of Sydney, some thirty kilometers distant. Here I endured weekly boarding and Mum would drive me in Monday mornings and pick me up Friday afternoons. By this stage she moaned considerably about having to drive me. I had no sympathy as I loathed the school and felt it was just punishment for her making me go there. She did occasionally manage to wiggle out of this by getting Dad to drop me at the Hydrofoil in Manly that took me over Sydney Harbour to Circular Quay in the city. From there with my suitcase full of a week's clothes, I took a bus to the school. As I was prone to panic attacks by this stage, I did not enjoy this exercise but managed it nonetheless. But I had my revenge because I was mostly driven to school during those six years even though I had to endure my mother complaining about it. If my parents had had the sense to send me to the local high school a mere three kilometers away, I could have done the bus trip without an issue so they made that rod for their own backs.
I give them their due, however, by the time I went to University they presented me with a brand new car that I loved and enjoyed for ten years and would even carry my baby son in the rear when he arrived. Driving to University became the way I overcame my panic attacks. It took an effort but the car became my home away from home. It was a very snazzy, mustard coloured Datsun 1200 Coupe and I am forever grateful for this gift from my parents. I have never since been without a car and would feel I had lost a limb if I was.
Driving my new born baby proved a challenge in my little coupe. He was too young for a baby car seat and there weren't the snazzy contraptions for carrying a baby in the car in those days. My solution was, with great difficulty, to put his carry basket minus baby on the rear seat. This involved putting the front seat forward and getting the basket through the opening. Then I would put the rear seatbelts through the basket's handles and clip them in to their fasteners to hold it in place. Then baby went in and finally there was a nifty webbing I had bought at a baby shop that I put over the top of the basket that was then secured around its edges so my son was safe and would only hit the soft criss-cross webbing rather than being hurled around the car should I have an accident. Of course once I arrived at my destination I had to retrieve son from this device and put him in the pram I carried in the boot of the car. It was quite a business. When he was big enough he went into a child car seat and when he turned five he just sat on a booster seat and was strapped in with a seat belt. There was none of this being in a child seat until the age of seven or a specific height.
Whenever my parents drove me I would look out the window and enjoy the scenery. Even on repetitive trips to the same places I would still enjoy the view. Not so my son. Scenery did not enthrall him at all. His three children have video screens to watch when they are being driven and this makes me roll my eyes to heaven. I suppose it's anything for peace but he, as a child, was never a problem even without amusement.
When my son was two and a half we moved to Hong Kong where they also drive on the left as we do in Australia. The public transport was brilliant but we liked taking excursions and I also needed to drive my son to playschool. Life was just easier with a car. We bought an old Toyota Cressida whose favourite pastime was breaking down and led me to my first initiation into the local mentality. I have mentioned in earlier posts that I was young and glamorous during my Hong Kong sojourn and one early morning I was dressed in a long turquoise coloured velour shift with a long side split up one leg when husband decided he needed to be driven to work for some reason. As we had a maid, I could drive my husband and leave our son with her and, as I wouldn't be seen, it didn't matter what I was wearing.
We got down to Wanchai easily enough where I dropped husband and then proceeded towards Central, then up Cotton Tree Drive to the Mid Levels. There, on a hill on a single lane road in traffic, the car conked out. I tried to restart it. No luck. I tried again a few times and then, dressed as I was, I got out of the car and spread my arms in a helpless gesture to the cars behind me. In Australia a couple of able bodied fellows would have jumped from their cars and helped push mine out of the way. No one honked and no one helped. The Chinese man in the Mercedes behind me just sat impassively waiting. This had a profound effect on me. I decided if no one wanted to help they would thus be stuck sitting on the hill and that was their choice. I got back in the car and relaxed. I've never felt so calm in such a situation. Why panic and feel bad when no one was willing to help me and, thus, themselves? I sat waiting a few more minutes and eventually decided to try the ignition again and, lo and behold, the car started and I drove home but I had learned a very important lesson. I don't know why no one tried to help but I thought it might have come down to Chinese 'loss of face' but the episode taught me to go with the flow.
We would lend the car to a Swiss chef who lived in our building because he let us use his parking spot. He would use the car some weekends to take his family out but would take it as a personal affront when it broke down even though he knew it wasn't reliable. There's one thing about the Swiss, they expect things to run like clockwork.
When my husband sentenced us to life back in Australia after three years we bought a new car and he also had a company car. I am not fond of Perth and we would take drives south to Margaret River and Dunsborough, where my parents would end up living some years later. There are places north and east of Perth where there is something akin to greenery for a short stretch but it isn't lush and eventually runs out. Even so we went east and explored Toodyay, York and even Kalgoorlie. One forgettable holiday we went north to Kalbarri, which was meant to be tropical. It was not but has some spectacular gorges. We also went north on the coast to Yanchep and even the awful Lancelin. The beach there is as barren and glary as you would wish and my son, then six years old, and I ran into a snake coming out of the men's toilet block. We turned and ran and then one of our friends, who had come in convoy in another car, decided to chase it with a spade against everyone's advice. Fortunately it out slithered him.
We dared to visit Lancelin another time but not the beach. We drove past it to visit the remarkable Pinnacles, a petrified forest an hours drive north of the town reached first by sealed road and then a very rocky dirt track that we somehow managed in our sedan.
There was a time on a vacation in Hawaii that I tried to drive on the right and immediately handed the car back to my husband. That was way too dyslexic a feeling. When I went to France years later with my partner, who is Polish, I didn't even try the right side driving and pulled my weight by way of being navigator from Paris to Versailles then through the Loire Valley. We loved the villages in the countryside and the Chateaux with their magnificent gardens. We then drove through the Alps down to beautiful Nice and stunning Monaco.
Another earlier vacation that I took with my husband and son was to Sri Lanka and the Maldives on our way back from Hong Kong. We stopped in Sri Lanka one night on our way to the Maldives to which we would fly in the morning. I have no idea where the hotel was that we stayed in as we were driven there in the dark. I think the reception had some light but, after being led to our room in the one story building, when we entered there was no electric light, or any light for that matter. It was pitch black and we groped our way to the beds, found them, felt for bugs and put our son to sleep. I just lay on the covers of the bed and hoped nothing would bite me. In the morning, on going out the door, there was a beach in view but everything in the night was so dark we had no idea of our surroundings.
We spent over a week in the Maldives and it's a place you couldn't pay me to return to no matter what the brochures look like. We had arrived during Ramadan and the food we were subjected to made my then fifty kilo frame drop another two kilos. I'm sure the water looked pretty but you needed shoes to swim as the sand was made of broken up coral and hurt your feet. We were the closest island to the capital Male because we wanted to be close to civilization if our son was sick. Happily he wasn't but I'm really not too sure there was any civilization if we needed it. The view from our bungalow consisted of rotting ship hulks as the Maldives is the one of the cheapest places in the world to moor them.
After that we had a driver take us on a five day driving tour of Sri Lanka. He was a local and had no personality and little English. If I managed to get him to stop to take a photo, he did so two hundred meters after the photo opportunity. People had their hands out wherever we went and it was a thoroughly miserable place. The travel brochures and television advertisements in Hong Kong quoted Mark Twain as saying it was the most beautiful place on earth. It wasn't. I had no idea the people there were so poor and felt for them but the whole place had a bad atmosphere. No doubt our driver's pay was a pittance so we tipped him well.
I haven't travelled overseas for twenty four years now. Hard to believe I know but divorce, lack of employment opportunities and a failed business all added up. At least I found employment driving a cab and it only paid the bills, but I'm extremely grateful I managed to do it for twelve years before Covid hit. I thoroughly enjoyed those years and part of the reason for that is I love driving. You are your own boss in a cab and, being outdoors in a pretty place like Brisbane, is a bonus.
I'm overdue for a long driving holiday and am even considering going as far as Dunsborough where my father's ashes rest. We've all been cooped up because of the pandemic and now domestic travel appeals to me as much as foreign. Another consideration in regard to foreign travel is that there are places I would no longer consider going because, if I catch the virus, I want to be very certain the hospitals in a place are excellent.
There are many places I am sorry not to have seen but I'm also fortunate to have seen many. I've travelled around New Zealand by car. I've ridden pillion behind my father one day on a motorcycle on Norfolk Island. I've also had a driving lesson in a Fiat Bambino bouncing across a golf course on that island with Dad beside me and Mum in the back seat as I kangarooed across the fairways learning to change gears. The course was as much paddock as it was fairway. The year I finished school my parents took my cousin and I to beautiful Fiji for Christmas. We were there for three weeks and were driven between Suva and Lautoka We stayed on both Viti Levu and Vanua Levu and also did the three day Blue Lagoon cruise around some outlying islands.
I spent only four days in London and experienced its traffic on a bus from the airport to my hotel. I've also visited Penang in Malaysia, Bangkok and Phuket in Thailand, the Phillipines, Bali and passed many times through Singapore where I've also stayed. In all these places I have been driven in some form of transport and I find it to be the best way to see a place. My only regret is the frequency with which I've travelled. Travelling blows fresh air through the mind and also makes home more appealing when you return.
I hope I have journeys yet to make. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
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