Summer holidays

Holidays get easier as the kids get older.

There is nothing like that moment on our summer holidays when we crest Takaka Hill, come around a bend and catch our first glimpse of the Takaka Valley stretching away to the blue of Golden Bay. It is superior to the very next feeling I always have which is that it’s one hell of a drop off the side of the road if we should happen to go over the edge.

For one reason or another I take a deep breath and relish the sense of a holiday really beginning, after the chore of packing, a sometimes uncomfortable ferry crossing and an even more uncomfortable drive in a hot car.

It’s getting easier as the kids get older, though. The ferry trip used to be an endurance test with bored young children; this time my elder daughter and my husband spent the time trying to calculate the odds against all four players each getting an entire suit when a pack of cards is dealt between them (she’d read it somewhere in a book, and it turns out that they are astronomical) while the others occupied themselves happily with games.

It was a far cry from the ferry crossing we did a few years ago when the kids discovered one of their teachers was on board so they hid for three hours under a table. Anyway, for one reason or another, I always arrive in Golden Bay with a great sense of relief – the journey is over, we are on holiday, and life is good.

We rent houses on our summer holidays and each of them has its idiosyncrasies. This one is an A-frame Swiss-style chalet, which seems a bit over-engineered for Golden Bay, although with the way the weather has been in this part of the world it wouldn’t surprise anyone if it snowed heavily one day soon.

It also has a couple of resident chooks. One is broody and sits on its nest all day fantasising about motherhood, or whatever it is that broody chooks do. The other, which we’ve named Teriyaki, is used to being part of the household. It hangs around the door, trying to get in and I can see my husband sizing it up with one eye on the baking dish.

We have already knocked off a few of our favourite pursuits here. Our annual Poohsticks race at the wonderful Pupu hydro scheme was this year won by my husband’s stick, Beardy. My elder daughter had a particularly thin stick that she named Sarah Jessica Parker, but it became snared in overhanging ferns and lacked the strength to push through. My own stick, called Apostrophe on account of its shape, made either a geographical or grammatical error and disappeared entirely. That often happens to apostrophes.

Afterwards, the kids and I went to Paynes Ford where there are great swimming holes in the Takaka River. Unlike me, my kids are too young to take the possibility of cardiac arrest seriously so they leap from rocks into the cold deep water while I inch in, waiting for a complete loss of feeling to overcome my submerged lower body before sacrificing any more of it to the cold. Invigorating is the most polite way to describe it.

Not everyone has the same idea of what a good holiday should be, and nor should they, but if a casino is the answer to Fiji’s problems then the wrong question is being asked.

Ruler Voreqe Bainimarama has been quoted as saying that the project “provides a malleable fusion between the Western ideals of casino gaming with the strong cultural virtues of tribal and community life”. Hopefully it was the casino company rather than the Fijian taxpayer who paid for that particular bit of PR twaddle.

Quite apart from the malleable fusion, just what are the “Western ideals of casino gambling” that he is referring to? It will not always be wealthy tourists feeding the 500 slot machines; it will be desperate Fijians, too, and there are plenty of those already. Here’s one sure bet – gambling will not make their lives any better.