Rose Carlyle.

The adventurer, lawyer and author on sailing across the Indian Ocean, swimming with sharks, and lessons learnt along the way.

I hadn’t done that much travelling before I had children. I didn’t leave New Zealand until I was 15. I started practising law at 21 and had my first child at 26. When I had my third child, she was quite unwell and I stayed at home for a while, and then we started going on these sailing trips. We realised it was such a great way to give both ourselves and our children a way to see the world.

I did a year-long sailing trip across the Indian Ocean with my family in 2014. My three children, my husband at the time and I set off from Thailand and ended up in South Africa. There are so many different cultures and landscapes along the way. We went to the Maldives and destinations I’ve written about in my book, including Thailand and the Seychelles.

One of our favourite places was the Salomon Atoll of the Chagos

Archipelago. It’s an uninhabited atoll that can only be visited by yacht. You can only stay there for a month, and you just live this Robinson Crusoe life. The waters are absolutely teeming with life. Sharks circled our boat but we’d still go swimming, even though they were bigger than our daughter. It seems crazy now, but that’s what we did.

At sea, you begin to see your children as capable in their own right. You have no choice but to trust them. They learn there’s no one else to help them, perhaps other than the boat next door. It’s so interesting to see them learn. It’s also amazing how busy you can be when you’re just anchored in paradise. We’d get on with home schooling and cook every meal by hand. We’d snorkel a lot and we’d go to the beach and exercise.

You’d think we’d live off noodles and tinned food, but travelling on a yacht is so much about meal times and cooking, even if you’re in the middle of nowhere. There’s something about the sea air that makes you hungry. We’d catch fish and make Thai fish curries. We’d also bake coconut chocolate brownies, using coconut flesh we’d just scraped out.

We also circumnavigated New Zealand in over six weeks. It’s quite challenging but it’s so beautiful, pristine and unpopulated. You see so many whales and seals, it’s an incredible part of the world.

I think one of the big things I’ve learned from sailing is that when you put yourself in extreme situations you gain so much. You sail out of port and you lose cell phone connection… You fret for a second, and then you embrace it and end up feeling so much more connected and alive, despite the fact that you’re disconnected from much of the world. There’s also something about travelling as a family – even though you can get literal cabin fever, you get through that.

Also there’s nothing as good as landfall breakfast!

One of the big things I’ve learned from sailing is that when put yourself in extreme situations you gain so much.

I also love travelling on sleeper

trains. I’ve done the Trans-Siberian and trains through Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and Iran. When you catch a train you can often meet the locals that are just using the train as a way to travel within their own country. There’s this magic of a bygone age – there’s space and privacy, compared to a plane. It’s also a form of travel where you can take a good book and really settle in. I love the slower pace of travel, and I hope they have a resurgence.

When I wrote my first novel, I was newly divorced and raising three teenagers. It was pre-Covid, but I was already in a position of not being able to travel, so I really used fiction as a substitute for travel. It allowed me to return to these places really vividly in my imagination, to places I had been. There’s nothing like fiction to put you within a scene, whether you’re a writer or a reader, often more so than a movie, and that’s where I’ll be escaping to until we can travel again.

Rose Carlyle’s debut novel, The Girl in the Mirror (Allen & Unwin, $29.99), is out now.

Just back from... Waiheke Island in New Zealand, for a mini getaway.

Next up... I’m heading on my book tour, and the last stop will be Tauranga.