My hitchhiking holiday of 1989
Thirty-two free rides, 67 hours tramping, 0 lays. Adam Dudding relives a momentous South Island holiday.
The first thing I wrote in the teeny pocket-diary I bought to record the summer of 1989-1990 was a cautionary note for nosey-parkers.
The tone is precisely what you’d encounter on the first page of any
13-year-old’s diary, so the most interesting thing about it is probably the fact that I was 19 at the time.
I wrote, in capitals: ‘‘THIS JOURNAL RECORDS THE IMMORTAL WORDS AND ACTIONS OF THAT FAMOUS BERK ADAM ALOYSIUS NELSON DUDDING DURING THE EARLY MONTHS OF THE ONE THOUSAND-NINE HUNDRED AND NINETIETH YEAR OF OUR LORD DURING THE TIME OF HIS EPIC ‘SOUTH ISLAND TRIP’.’’
I then switched to lower case: ‘‘I wouldn’t bother reading it cos it’s f... ing boring, and contains lots of rude words, like poo, and w..k. OK?’’
I believe the message has stood the test of time (except that ‘‘Aloysius’’ was never part of my name – I was clearly just being hilarious).
So consider yourself duly warned if you now wish to join me as I revisit, with the help of that diary, moments from the summer when my best friend Anton and I bought matching black boots from Army Surplus, borrowed some backpacks, hitched to Nelson and Queenstown and did lots of tramping, then hitched back to Auckland having spent five weeks befriending strangers, growing blisters, losing camping equipment, getting very drunk in the Ross pub, teaching New Zealand swear-words to a German girl, waiting for cars, playing many hands of 500, killing sandflies and thinking about the future and about sex, though probably not in that order.
Auckland to Wellington was easy: a lift down-country with parents to a family Christmas, then a free freight-train ride to Wellington arranged helpfully – though quite possibly illegally – by my train-driver brother-in-law.
Once off the ferry at Picton, though, we were on our own. But the universe provides to those in possession of a thumb and, where necessary, an attention-seeking two-man roadside dance.
We learnt that the kind of people who stop for hitchers are frequently the kind of people who like to drink beer and smoke weed while driving.
My diary records that the Christchurch-to-Ashburton leg was courtesy of ‘‘drinking/dopesmoking hoons x3 – with crossbow’’, and that our final, epic 600km ride from Plimmerton to Auckland was with ‘‘Melissa and Judie who drank, smoked, & toked up SH1 till the Birkenhead turn-off’’.
We got rides from an entomology PhD student and a wheelchair saleswoman; from a DSIR retiree and a chatty businessman who insisted on showing us all the sights of Timaru; from a pair of preppy American men stick-shifting the hell out of the winding South Island roads.
We were treated to free meals, spare beds for the night and a blisteringly racist anecdote from an otherwise charming West Coaster.
More alarmingly, we got a ride from a lugubrious chap with a campervan who claimed not to be able to drive, so he’d collar passing travellers and let them take the campervan wherever they wanted, while he came along for the ride.
We shook him off at the start of the Abel Tasman coastal track, waving as he drove off with a new friend at the wheel.
We concluded he was either extremely lonely or a serial killer, probably both.
Our best day’s hitching, though, was moseying from Picton to
We learnt that the kind of people who stop for hitchers are frequently the kind of people who like to drink beer and smoke weed while driving.
Motueka with three Christchurch teenagers, Fleur, Megan and Bunny, singing along ironically to their single, endlessly flipped-over cassette of Cat Stevens hits, and marinating in the general sense of possibility.
We swapped addresses and imposed on their hospitality once we reached Christchurch. Three decades on, I’m still friends with Fleur.
The tramping bits of my diary are another thing entirely: a record of hours and kilometres covered, with topographical annotations (‘‘Up up up up and more f...ing up’’). There are observations about sore legs, snoring hut-mates, wildlife (‘‘got back and keas had put about 30 holes in tent and shat in it and eaten underpants’’) and frightening nocturnal attacks (‘‘Duck pulled my hair in the middle of night. Most freaky.’’)
We didn’t take enough books, and I finished my Gulliver’s Travels before Anton had finished his
Stephen King doorstop, so my diary entry for the evening of January 21,
1990, is a breathless account of watching someone else read: ‘‘Anton keeps on breathing and ticking and chuckling and rubbing his finger down the page. And it’s all over. And he grunts with disappointment at the obviously non-orgasmic ending.’’
(Once I’d read it, I understood that grunt. The Tommyknockers is total rubbish.)
When heavy rain trapped us in our tent we’d go just about mad. We’d cook extra meals: ‘‘Anton put crushed chillis in his nose, leading to many amusing minutes of screaming agony’’; we’d smoke our cooking herbs and practise smokerings: ‘‘all the side-effects of dope and no high. Nice mint aftertaste though’’; and we’d look for portents in nature: ‘‘Just watched a winged sandfly crawl along the map exactly where we plan to go: up SH6 through Murchison then on to Nelson, to Blenheim, then obviously out into the deep, just east of Cape Campbell, where a giant finger will push us off the world and squash us.’’
Five weeks went fast. By early February, we were back home and the diary is given over to to-do lists and titles of textbooks I needed for my final university year. The full thrilling entry for Sunday, February
19 reads ‘‘Can’t remember’’.
I’ve not read this diary from start to finish since I wrote it 30 years ago, so I’d totally forgotten that near the back I’d made a handy numerical summary of that extraordinary, life-changing trip. It doesn’t capture everything, but it’s a fair representation of some of the concerns of 19-year-old me, and it goes like this:
STATISTICS
■ 32 free rides
■ 8 paid rides (bus, train, ferry, bike)
■ 67 hours tramping
■ Got drunk 6 times
■ Smoked dope 3 times
■ Smoked tobacco 1 time
■ Got laid 0 times
Iwas living in Ireland in the mid-80s and, if I had to pinpoint a place and a time where my adult character began to take solid shape, it was probably there and then.
I arrived into that glorious stone-and-brick city of Dublin in the middle of an unusually hot dry summer and was smitten.
Dublin was beautiful, full of churches old enough to feel pagan and a predominantly Catholic population doing joyously Godless things.
The reticence of the people I’d grown up among in Whanganui was nowhere to be found. Words flowed out of people in great torrents – and drink flowed in.
Modern drunks staggered ancient streets and I tagged along, far from home, a magnet for mischief. I felt the power of a freshly minted adult, and the world seemed malleable, kindly, promising, brand new.
For the first-time ever, I was considered something of a catch. Was it the exotic accent, with its pancake vowels and rising inflection? Probably not.
I was also young and loose and slender in a way that gives me a jolt of pain when I think back on it now, old and round and uptight.
I got strong and brown working in the sun as a labourer for a landscape gardener, then retired to Slattery’s on Rathmines Rd to ensure my rightful share of Guinness wasn’t hoovered up by some thirsty stranger.
I had many girlfriends that summer and behaved without honour. Relationships routinely overlapped, like a Venn diagram where the middle bit might be marked ‘‘dodgy’’.
Good and bad things about my own character became more evident as the months passed. I had clothes hanging in assorted wardrobes around the town, a tiny box room in a former coal shed in Donnybrook, a mattress stowed behind a couch in Rathgar.
A wronged woman turned up at that last place early one morning and called me many unholy names at a volume that woke the downstairs neighbours.
A pint was poured over my head by another aggrieved party in a bar that stood between the Grand Canal and the Deaf Association meeting rooms, sparking frantic but silent gesticulation in half the nearby drinkers.
My free-and-easy, loose-asa-goose, hash and stout-addled summer was turning me into a bit of a dick.
So, I made an effort to calm down – and grow up. I drank less, put more energy into key friendships.
In a few months, I was returning to New Zealand, so I travelled further afield: up to Donegal, down to Cork, across to Galway.
I helped rebuild a dry-stone wall in County Clare and had my mind blown by primeval west coast landscapes where myth and antiquity clung like soft mist.
But, back in Dublin, a month before leaving, things got weird again. I paired up with a new girlfriend who was a stranger to the truth. Claire, I think, but this too might have been an invention.
She was wilder than I’ll ever be and therefore – for a short while – huge fun. She told stories constantly to anyone who’d listen and they were never the same in the telling.
The characters changed around a central narrative, as if she was endlessly re-staging a play with different actors in the key roles.
Her uncle had done this thing, or her schoolfriend, or her boss. It was in a stand of shrubs at Stephen’s Green, or an old van at Bray, or a school camp in Wexford.
They were rude stories mostly and she searched my face as she told them to gauge how I might respond.
Fingerings in church. Public nudity on the banks of the Liffey. Past sexual exploits with girls, boys, married men, clergy. Transgressive things.
She had pale skin, light freckles, sandy blonde hair. One story from her student days made my hair curl.
‘‘What are you talking about?’ she said, when I asked her to tell me more about it one day, a week before I flew home. She’d never been to that place, hadn’t done those things. Was I acting the maggot?
At the time, I drew no parallels with my own careless truthbending throughout that summer. I just felt confused and destabilised by her slippery personal fictions, which was probably a life lesson I needed.
I vividly recall the lovely old Victorian terrace where I lay in a sunburnt heap, while Claire told me these mad tales in an accent like soft music.
I looked at the place on Google Maps, just yesterday. The front has a flash private garden with a tall hedge now, but the same raggedy copper beech still looms over the back shed.
I took a digital stroll around the old neighbourhood, 30 years on from that distant summer, zooming down from the clouds to Street View, walking my mouse along the old lane from Highfield Rd to Slattery’s under chestnuts and sycamores, then out to my old coalscuttle gaff in Donnybrook.
I swooped out to the richer areas of Blackrock, Dun Laoghaire and Wicklow, searching for some of the grand old gardens I’d worked on during my landscaping days.
I wandered down Grafton St alongside Trinity College, then across Merrion Square, past the houses of Yeats and Oscar Wilde and circled the duckpond at St Stephen’s Green.
Strong emotions welled up to surprise me. I’m not ashamed to admit that I had a wee weep.
A wronged woman turned up at that last place early one morning and called me many unholy names at a volume that woke the downstairs neighbours.