Elisabeth Easther talks to sea kayak guide Ciara Pickering.
Because my dad is a sailor, for a long time life was one big holiday. I'm a Kiwi Filipino — I was born in Hong Kong, then we moved to China, and travelled all over before I started high school in Auckland.
Sailing with my family when I was about 12, we stopped in Thailand at a beachfront campsite. Mum had bought me a book called Chilling Tricks for Cool Chicks. One of the tricks involved mushing banana into my hair to make it more luscious, but then I had to figure out how to rinse it out. So I went swimming in the ocean when Mum thought it'd be brilliant to throw sand into my scalp to scrub the dead skin off and get rid of the banana — so not only did I have banana in my hair, there was sand as well. For ages my hair smelt like bananas, so I was lucky not to be attacked by ants — because they're huge in Thailand. And they bite.
My mum runs a sanctuary, or hacienda, in the Philippines. She farms rice and pigs, and we have two horses, lots of dogs, geese, ducks and over the years she's planted heaps of trees. We visited recently and it's this green space in the middle of all this brown.
While there we visited Taal Lake where there's an island inside a dormant volcano within a lake. We took a boat over then rode horses up to the lake. Only the Philippines equivalent of a horse is like the New Zealand equivalent of a donkey. And we're pretty big compared to the average Filipino and there were moments we felt we should get off the horses to make it less stressful for them. I knew I was meant to be enjoying it but I was anxious for the horses.