Elisabeth Easther talks to the chairwoman of Pirongia Tourism.
I'm a fourth-generation Hamiltonian. I grew up in Frankton, and as a child it was a big deal to go to Raglan for a day trip. When I was 12, we went to Australia, this was a major undertaking and my parents saved for over a year. We spent a few days in Sydney and it felt so exotic. Taking a train from Sydney to Brisbane, because we were on a budget, we went third class, which meant we had to sit upright in our seats all night. I remember it being a horrible experience, but knowing we were going to Surfers Paradise made it bearable. But for some reason, everywhere we went, we bought potato fritters. They were what people were eating in Australia in the early 1980s and that holiday was defined by them.
When I lived in Japan, my flatmate and I travelled from Osaka to Tokyo, and she arranged a ride with an employee of the company she worked for.
Thanks to this driver's tattoos and missing fingers, we quickly realised he was a Yakuza courier delivering Kobe beef to a Yakuza family. He spoke no English but he did have a Best of the Beatles cassette with eight songs on it, so our only way to communicate for nine hours in a car was by singing Beatles' songs. But it wasn't safe to drive at night, so halfway there we stopped at what turned out to be a Pachinko parlour. We were fed a meal of pure Kobe beef, which is extraordinarily expensive, then Mama-San, the madam who looks after the Yakuza men, locked us in a room in the back of the building and told us to stay there because it wasn't safe for us. We didn't speak much Japanese and she had no English and we spent the whole night wide awake and worried.
When the war was on in Sarajevo, I decided to explore Eastern Europe by train. When my friend and I arrived in Hungary, we spoke to a travel agent, who told us that the border to Yugoslavia had been closed and we had to be sure we stayed on the right side. On the overnight train from Hungary to Slovakia, we were the only tourists and the guard insisted on taking our passports. Then at about four in morning this guy was banging on our door saying, "get up, get up get up". We came so close to missing our stop which would've meant getting off on the wrong side of the border in Sarajevo without our passports in the middle of a civil war. That could've turned out badly.