Summer holiday . . .

It’s been more challenging this year – planning a summer holiday. Nepal’s still messy with rebel ratbags. The Americans are flinging missiles into Pakistan, India’s iffy and Thailand’s still a bit doubtful. Qantas doesn’t appeal and the other airlines want me to bail them out by charging silly ticket prices and then more for bags, meals, the toilet and even for disembarking.

Lake Hauroko might be the best bet this summer. A tent, some freeze dried stuff, and some tins of baked beans, spaghetti and ravioli, some energy chocolate and peanuts and some boxes of red wine. I’ll need a small barrel of insect repellent and some sun block, a floppy hat, an old t-shirt, maybe two in case the first one needs a wash…

Books? The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope and I think I’ll re-read Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts and Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen. They’re good yarns well-written.

Shall I take a fishing rod? I’ll need to faff about with hooks and line and knots and licences and is it the fishing season? Good grief – how can holidaying simply be even that complicated? And really, trout’s a bit manky to eat so maybe not. There’ll be crawlies – which are fresh water lobsters but I guess by now they’re protected, integral as they are to global climate change and peace in Darfur.

I guess I’ll take some freeze dried curries and some boxes of macaroni cheese disposing of the packaging in an environmentally responsible way – of course. Oooh and chocolate chippies and cameo cremes and gingernuts for dunking in tea (which won’t be Jasmine or Lady Grey or Raspberry & Placenta) drunk from a rugged enamel mug.

My family went to Lake Hauroko in the old days – when we lived in Tuatapere, when Invercargill was ‘the big city’. We charred sausages on a fire and glued them with tomato sauce to thin slices of white bread (because brown bread was for hippies). There might also have been lettuce salad – and I’m not talking about mesculine lettuce because in Southland there was only lettuce-type lettuce. And the mayonnaise was made from condensed milk as only it should be, leaving plenty in the tin to occupy me for an hour or so. The salad will have had tomatoes and slices of boiled egg to make it look fancy. But that’s all because any-
thing more is silly and wasteful and townie.

Hasn’t it all got too complicated and difficult and tedious? iPods, gmail, GPS interactive whiteboards, coalition governments, liquidity crises, terrorists…

Lake Hauroko it is – with a billy and freeze dried stuff and tea and books and chocolate chippies.

— Peter Giddens