The must-do broadening experience of a lifetime
I travelled rough when I was young. Now that I’m much older, I will only travel in style, accompanying my husband, if possible, when we have the chance. But I fully intend to travel until I can no longer do so.
Australians tend to be great travellers. We have to be, since our country is so far away from the hub of things in the northern hemisphere. And that is where our Aussie ancestors came from: Ireland, England, Scotland, France and Germany, in our family’s case.
In my twenties, I left our shores by boat to visit, firstly, the “Mother Land” — England — and thence to France, a truly foreign country for me back then. From there I traveled all around the continent in a broken-down French Citroen. It was called a “Deux Chevaux” in French, which translated into English as a “two-horse-power” car.
I’d spent a year working at the Australian Embassy in Paris to earn enough to purchase the vehicle and to travel, in the summer of 1968, with three of us girlfriends sharing the petrol. We broke down in most of the fifteen countries we passed through, and I learnt car mechanical terms in many languages.
The most adventurous part of the whole trip was visiting the Ukraine, when it was still part of the USSR during the Cold War years. Young Russian citizens were keen to get books and dollars from naive travelers like us. Street food was stodgy back then, but we got to eat in tourist restaurants that were of high quality and inexpensive for us.
It was amazing to pass through so many richly diverse cultures in Europe, whereas the people spread out across the vast Australian continent were similar in most respects from one side to the other of the country. This has changed a lot now in the twenty-first century.
High points were travelling through Switzerland, a “forever young” land for me, peopled by Heidi and her goats from childhood stories; the beauty of the Mediterranean countries where we swam from rocky shores in Italy; the magnificent landscapes in the former Yugoslavia and the turquoise of the Adriatic Sea.
And what about the people we met along the way?
Generous villagers in Yugoslavia invited us to join in a wedding feast; a proud Moslem family in Bosnia served us tea and cake in their home; young Italian men cooked pasta for us at a camping site and took us dancing at night; and a kind Turkish man did a quick fix with a rubber band to help us reach a service station.
Yes, it was the kindness of strangers, the people that we met along the way, that stands out for me now when I reflect on these early travel years. People the world over are mostly kind and helpful, and that’s a great and comforting thing to find out through your travels.