Don’t sneer at fellow Australian holiday bogans lest you become one

I had always been faintly sniffy about bogan Australian tourists in trouble abroad. You’ve seen them on the news, right? They’re the ones who spent far too much time on the sunbed, transforming themselves into a duck terrine with eyes, before a series of (entirely foreseeable) catastrophes culminated in a brush with death later recounted for the cameras in a series of hysterical, mangled vowels.

But those who go around sticking a middle finger up at the gods of currency exchange should be wary of renewing their own passports. Trust me, I speak from bitter experience.

Our tale of woe begins at the foot of the highway leading up to the Mont Blanc Tunnel, which connects France (where I was whining about the freezing January weather and refusing to ski) with Italy (where I planned to continue whining about the freezing January weather and refusing to ski).

Michelle Cazzulino’s hire car on the tow truck near the entrance to the Mont Blanc Tunnel. She and her two younger children were taken down the mountain in the back of the car.Credit:

It had already been a long day, as they invariably are when they start at Sydney Airport and involve three children under five and approximately 860 million hours’ flying time.

The only adult capable of rational thought at that point, who – for the purposes of this discussion we’ll call “my husband” – was driving the hire car. And by “driving” I obviously mean “inching excruciatingly up the mountain to the tunnel in a 10-kilometre traffic queue because every single person on the French side of the border had simultaneously decided he or she wanted to immediately go skiing on the Italian side of the border”.

Not-so-happy travels for Michelle Cazzulino.Credit:

Views notwithstanding, it was an unpleasant drive, punctuated by signs warning about poor air quality. From the outset of the climb we had noted a pungent smell, a cloying mix of rotten eggs and burning something, which I loudly declared was the pollution and/or my will to live. After a while, it was accompanied by steam vapours that seemed to be rising from the bonnet of the hire car. Friends, we were exactly 500 metres from the entrance to the tunnel when our engine suddenly shut down irretrievably – the result, apparently, of a clutch that had been ridden harder than an outside chance at The Everest.

The French border police, having seen this rolling merde show before, were quick to respond. From nowhere, there materialised a tow truck, whose driver, a shaggy haired, snaggle-toothed, chain-smoking yokel, was glued to his phone, where he appeared to be in a life-or-death negotiation with his bookie.

With a series of sweeping hand gestures, he indicated that my husband and the eldest of our children should ride in the cab of his truck with him. The younger ones and I were to remain strapped into our hire car. But before you could say “I’m sure a courtesy vehicle is en route for the rest of us”, there was a jolt, and our car was being lifted onto the cab of the tow truck. Another jolt, and we were at a 45-degree angle, which afforded a bird’s-eye view of the following: the mountain below, my husband, our eldest child, and our driver, who had one hand holding the cigarette dangling out the window, the other hand still glued to the phone at his ear, and the steering wheel between his knees.

I began praying aloud (Hail Mary to the tune of the Wiggles’ Big Red Car, lest I alarm the baby) and by some happy miracle, we were not catapulted off the side of the mountain and into an icy grave of twisted metal and totally avoidable death.

The moral of this story is as follows: don’t ride the clutch on the way up to the Mont Blanc Tunnel; don’t sneer at fellow Australian holiday bogans lest you become one; and don’t let your three-year-old impale himself on a rose bush or it will destroy his ski jacket and send a spray of duck feathers floating through the air like confetti. But that’s a tale for another day.

Michelle Cazzulino is a Sydney writer.

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