DOWN MEMORY LANE

Traveller’s Woes

I adore travelling. When I was ten, my mother put me and my toddler brother on ‘daytrip’ buses, with a bag containing food, drinks, our bathers, a towel and coins for ice cream. She waved us off as we toured England and Wales. Mum was there when we always managed to return to the bus station. My brother and I covered most of England by our late teens.

Another success story was travelling to Belgium, aged 11, with Granddad revisiting the scenes of his WWI traumas. The trenches, still with boots, rifles, helmets and other reminders of man’s inhumanity to man, plus Granddad’s tears and stories are etched in my memory.

But after these successful starts to my travelling, things gradually got worse…

A school trip to France prepared me for the hiccoughs to come. My French teacher, the previous day, had got lost on the Metro but I escorted us girls – wearing our English school uniforms – on the right train, arriving hours before she appeared with the Gendarmerie.

As we were about to board our plane the following day for home my name was blared out on the public address system. “What have you done now?” she demanded. My passport photo taken at 11 years bore no resemblance to the 16yo before the immigration officer. “Hmm," she said, “some ugly ducklings do become swans.” The others all got the flight. Miss Northend and I travelled in silence on a later one.

Sometimes it’s a situation of my own making. During Uni holidays backpacking around Europe, I was arrested in Rome for taking coins out of the Trevi Fountain. Luckily, I was able to

The Suez Canal crisis delayed our ship to Australia for 2 weeks. The amended route around Africa included a terrible cyclone in the Bay of Biscay and our money stolen in Cape Town. Arriving in Melbourne 7 weeks overdue, our baby’s measles meant we were the last to leave the ship.

Rome was the focus for more dramas with money stolen in Rome (again). Then Rome airport caught fire. I persuaded Alitalia to put us in a hotel and feed us for 2 days. We'd lost all our UK bookings.

Even after winning a trip to the Solomon Islands, we were met with boarded-up shops and Aussie soldiers and police everywhere, warning us of violent riots. We were bundled into a tiny tinny and taken to a remote island. Our accommodation was a WW2 cement bunker with no electricity, occasional running water and human contact limited to one native village. Other hiccoughs included a sudden army coup in Fiji which saw one holiday transferred to

Mauritius and a French motorcycle cop who attempted to ‘fine’ us for stealing our hire car! We also experienced cyclones in Fiji, hurricanes in Florida and the Bermuda Triangle, and the Memphis police guarding the next room’s drug lab. Our anticipated adventure on the Indian Pacific train met with torrential rain, flooding and a collapsed track – the ‘train trip of a lifetime’ was completed on a bus.

Despite all these misadventures I am still looking forward to enjoying a trouble-free holiday … sometime!

Eileen Walder