Four of a kind
The radio host asks me to name my four best overseas trips ever, with emphasis on that last word. I am (uncharacteristically) stuck for words.
The radio host asks me to name my four best overseas trips ever, with emphasis on that last word. I am (uncharacteristically) stuck for words.
We are live to air. Deep breath. We engage in a bit of to-and-fro about the question’s degree of difficulty while I trawl my memory. How to condense a lifetime of being on the move to just a few experiences.
I have been travelling since age three, holding on to my foreign correspondent father’s hand, or trench coat tails, but let’s zoom to that teenage gap year, alone in India, the period that changed everything. That first sense of being somewhere so exotic, so out of tune with my Australian and European roots, the confronting poverty, richness of culture and the comforting kindnesses of strangers.
The clock is ticking. I fast-forward to 2019 and a cruise along the Nile in Egypt with the very best of companions on a small charter boat. We sail through centuries and gorge on history. All that’s missing is my good friend, Christine, with whom I “did” the Nile in 1991 and it cost us $2 because that’s what the tour operator, desperate to resuscitate tourism after the Gulf War, was charging as a side-trip from England. Our cabin was tiny, with twin beds pushed together, and the airconditioning was stuck on an icy setting and we lay frozen side-by-side like sarcophagi surrounded by the bounty of a hundred bazaars.
South America? Perfect, as I can weave two trips into one. Visiting Machu Picchu with my archaeology-mad younger son and being determined to climb great heights, breathing in the thin air and not holding him back from his adventure of a lifetime. Almost falling to my demise when a llama charged and I all but toppled over the edge. That feeling of tackling new emotional and physical boundaries and being the best and most adventurous mother I could be. And then in Brazil, a year later, a massively early start up to the Christ the Redeemer figure overlooking Rio de Janeiro. The moon was lowering beneath the statue’s outstretched arms and the awakening city below appeared as a black quilt embroidered with bright sequins. Feeling breathless again, this time with sheer wonder.
I am getting the wind-up signal. To Nagoya, Japan, in November, 2018, to meet my just-born granddaughter, and lying in bed that night in the most meagre of hotel rooms as snowflakes whitened the window. Looking at iPhone pictures of her crinkled little face, still feeling the warmth hours later of her blanket-wrapped body. I’m your Nonna and I will show you the world, I whispered to her sleeping image. Your name is Mia Susan Kurosawa. You were born for this.
