Photographer Tanya Laketext layer

Road Trippin’ – from Brisbane to Sydney in a van

 

 

Headin’ down the coast in an Apollo camper van with 2 kids & my man.

Pulling into Nimbin.

A young entrepreneur offers us weed. “Youse aren’t cops are ya? you’re not gunna arrest me are ya? Youse are, aren’t ya. You’re cops”…

Husband: “Why would I be a cop – i’m in a camper with 2 kids”

The children fly down the street on their scooters , bubbles streaming behind them, but they are not of their making. An elderly man blows the bubbles. He has a dark leathery bare chest, feathers in his hat and his grin reveals an encyclopaedia of stories in a mouth of yellowing fence-post teeth.

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We met a carpet python yesterday. She was smooth & a little edgy. We were in a wildlife sanctuary & the indigenous keeper of the python explained that the python was jumpy because her head swayed upwards. She also mentioned that there was a carpet python in one of every 3 homes on the East Coast of Australia. Then she shrugged.

Back in Nimbin, up a potholed dusty hill we put the camper into first and fang it up the drive through waist deep grass to the Free Love hostel.

In trees amongst the field of grass are shelters endowed with art and up-cycled furniture but light on walls, or indeed roofs. The carpet python is still fresh in our memory when the manager introduces himself and says; “Watch out for the snakes”.

I feel a bit sorry for the backpackers. The tree house had been deemed off limits by the local council and other options for accommodation include a yurt with sides that don’t  quite reach the ground (snakes), a “recycling station” where old beds lie in the long grass (snakes), a burnt out combi with “free love 1969”  on the side (snakes for sure), and a kids cubby house that is, in the scheme of it all, quite well built.

We make a fire and cook dinner, feeling grateful that we can seal out the bush with fly screen doors and sleep soundly in our hired van. The bird song in the morning is raucous. Yesterday we saw a pelican with a shimmery blue head and legs that were not webbed feet but two sticks snapped in half and bent forward. Everything ’round here that looks to be normal, turns out, is not quite.

So we head into a jungle glade of the sort that you can only find in far north New South Wales – the kind with vines that lick your face and leaves the size of an apes palm. A faded sign points to a water hole and platypus spotting. The cicadas start up their morning drone, a vibration like the engines of a space ship. We don’t spot any platypus, but we do see two naked backpackers having a wash.

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Do I pretend here? Do I frame this travel adventure like it is a perfect little utopia, where it’s all peace love and mung beans, all the way baby?

Driving in the van with kids squabbling is a pain. But it’s slightly better than driving in a car.  You know how, as the passenger in a car, when you have kids in the back on a long trip you spend the whole time twisting? Where you wrench around into positions you later regret, to retrieve pens, and vegemite smeared worm biscuits, and dummies, and try to replug in the laptop, and get the thing to play, try to smack the kid who threw the pen and then scream and threaten, and then beg your partner to stop at a bottle shop?

Well in a van it’s different, but also all the same. This time you unbuckle and climb from the front over to the bench table in the back to retrieve the dummy. You stand in side surfer stance as the van bumps and swerves forward as you travel unfastened, opening the fridge to make their snacks, trying to turn up the volume on the dvd, pointing out the big banana or the giant prawn through the window that they can’t quite see out of, and realising that the air conditioning doesn’t work in the back and the little rascals are dripping with sweat.

Long trips with kids are never much fun. But breaking it up with swims seems to be the best solution. On the 700 k’s south we found public pools in sun blasted country towns, water parks nears Surfers Paradise, water holes in the hinterland at Uki and and of course, the thing I love most – the beach.

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