Elisabeth Easther talks to Graeme Ransom of Country Village Heaven Greytown Tours
My dad worked on the railways so I lived in Taihape till I was five when we moved to Tauranga before going onto Auckland. Fifty-plus years ago railways were a bit like airlines, relatively glamorous and well paid, and he had a free travel pass for a month each year. We also had a car, and in those days if you had a car you used it. The first holiday I remember we went to Napier, across the Gentle Annie from Taihape. In those days it was all dirt and I remember it being a long, drawn-out journey. A couple of years ago I did it in my Mazda RX8 and it was a beautiful drive, with views out to Ruapehu.
The "Kuala Lumpur" was a ship that used to do schoolboy cruises out of Auckland, and when it wasn't doing regular cruises it sailed from Indonesia to Malaysia to Mecca. It was a very old ship, pre-war, and down below was all open dorms and hammocks where 200 kids would sleep. Over 10 days we went to Tonga, Samoa, Fiji, New Caledonia — although we weren't supposed to get too near the regular tourists.
When I was 17, I hitchhiked by myself around the South Island. I had a tent, a big pack and some cooking utensils. I'd get one of those giant cans of spaghetti, cook it up and eat the whole can with some bread and a bit of fruit. My mother was very resourceful and made me take a cake of Sunlight soap so I could wash my self, my hair and my dishes with it. I rang home once or twice and returned five weeks later with just two cents left, having started with $100. And my parents just let me go — thinking about it now it was all pretty easy, but you wouldn't let your kids do that now.
Hitchhiking was different in those days. On one occasion a car pulled up, an old Prefect, and it was full of children and luggage and stuff, yet somehow they fitted me in.
