Peter Goers: International travel is overrated when we have so much to see in Australia

Overseas travel is booming post-Covid, with all Australians seemingly desperate to get on a plane. Not Peter Goers though.

The wonderful world beckons but there’s no place like home. I don’t want to travel anywhere but Oz. Let me count the reasons I want to stay home.

My travel agent has almost retired and I’d never leave Australia without the guidance of a travel agent.

Covid was hard on all of us but hardest of all for travel agents and they deserve our support.

If you don’t use a travel agent you have no one to blame, consult and help when things go awry as surely they will.

The only places I really want to visit – I can’t.

I’d love to go to North Korea and you can tour it cheaply but you are precluded if you have ever worked for a media organisation.

North Korea is on Peter Goers’ travel bucket list, but is out of the question. Picture: Kim Won Jin/AFP

I’d love to go to Afghanistan – the graveyard of empire – but it’s tricky.

I’ve always said I’d never step foot in the UK until Australia is a republic and free of our colonial overlords, but I doubt we will see a republic in my lifetime so I can forget visiting Britain, and the only place I’d really like to visit there is Glasgow.

I’d like to visit Silesia (once Prussia, now Poland) whence my family came in the 1840s.

I’d like to see people who look like me but I can do that in the Barossa, which is only an hour away and I can have a nice pastie and strudel at the Apex Bakery and go to Elcies Op Shop in Tanunda – neither of which are available in beautiful downtown industrial Silesia.

Peter would perhaps travel to Poland given his family history, but says he can get the same vibe in the Barossa Valley. Picture: Getty Images

I’m fine with international flights. Once you’ve dealt with the rugby scrum of getting your luggage in the overhead locker, I settle in and, since I quite like airline food, I eat everything put in front of me, watch movies, take a pill that would sedate the criminally insane, sleep and wake up in another country.

It’s the airports I can’t deal with. I can’t deal with the tension of not knowing if my luggage will arrive with me.

Having been persecuted by airlines which managed to lose my luggage 14 times in four years I have luggage PTSD.

Neither can I deal with the vagaries of airlines and their cancelled and delayed flights and the endless queuing.

Ironically, having flown round the world unable to smoke, I now smoke one cigarette a day and so there’s no longer non-smoking torture but who cares, I can stay home and not smoke.

So many people who fly internationally seem to either come down with a bad cold (or worse) because planes are petri-dishes of lurgies.

Plus, I can no longer afford to travel internationally and the low value of the Australian dollar is doubly prohibitive.

And the older you get the more expensive travel insurance becomes.

The cruise I took from Melbourne to Tasmania via Adelaide to avoid Christmas at home (always good idea) was bad and boring and it’s put me off cruise ships.

International travel has been democratised. Once the province of the rich, now everyone is travelling everywhere. Good.

Travellers taking selfies – one of the more annoying things you’ll encounter on an international holiday.

But we’d all like to travel exclusively and not have to deal with hordes taking selfies in front of everything the world over.

A friend recently returned from Japan having spent her time there queuing for everything. No thanks.

I’ve missed seeing Venice (too crowded, too smelly), missed my chance to see the passion play at Oberammergau (played only once a decade) but I contemplate getting on a cargo ship for the experience rather than the destination.

Travel is exhausting. I’ve been so lucky to have seen so much of the world and now I prefer my own bed. Or that in nice Australian motels.

Give me the Flinders Ranges any day, says Peter. Picture: iStock

Our nation is vast and glorious and I want to see more of it.

I love a desert and Kalgoorlie here I come.

There is nothing in the world more spectacular and spiritual than our own Flinders Ranges and nothing more beautiful and comforting as the Naracoorte Swimming Lake.

See you there. Actually, you stay home while I go.

Peter Goers can be heard weeknights and Sundays on ABC Radio Adelaide until November 30