My seal of disapproval

Irented a campervan and sought the romance of the road. Now, I’m well aware that I’ve been rude about campervans in the past and even ruder about the people driving them. In my defence I will say only that I was young at the time and youth can be intemperate. Moreover, I was trying to hitch around the country and as every hitchhiker knows you have as much chance of being picked up by a campervan as you have of being beamed up by a UFO.

Nevertheless, I said what I said and if you wish to charge me with hypocrisy, go ahead. But I did not foresee a global pandemic that would lay waste to tourism and make it every citizen’s patriotic duty to rent a campervan and go see some scenery.

People have a touching faith in scenery. They believe that the mere act of beholding lakes and mountains, snow and sky, even if only through the windscreen of a campervan, has therapeutic benefits. What exactly those benefits are is never specified but the belief is especially common in countries that have industrialised their own scenery out of existence. So down to the Southern Ocean they come to get a fix of ours.

So strong is this belief that trade in it has overtaken trade in wool and sheep meat and it is now our second-largest export industry, after milk.

But it doesn’t feel like an export industry. It feels as though we are importing, albeit temporarily, a lot of tourists and their dollars. All we’re sending out of the country in exchange is the unproven psychological benefits of scenery, which puts the business roughly on a par with the trade in deer velvet. But willing buyer, willing seller and all that.

Now, however, the tourists who should be sipping at our scenery are stuck at home in Honshu and Hamburg. The campervans and cash registers stand idle, and the therapeutic photons that the scenery gives off, instead of crashing into human retinas, are zooming off into space and going to waste. Unless, that is, you and I rent campervans and intercept them.

A campervan is a room on wheels that seeks to be a kitchen, bathroom, living room, dining room and bedroom. The first consequence is that it’s none of these things. The second is that it’s cramped. And the third is that it presents an amusing set of challenges for those of us of the fuller figure.

We drove down to Central Otago, across to Te Anau – but not to Milford because the road was closed – and back through the Lindis Pass and the Mackenzie, and it was all very pretty. But now that I am home my lasting memory is not of scenery but of trying to get out of bed.

By dint of natty folding things one end of the campervan becomes a double bed at night. But that bed’s enclosed on three sides by walls and on the fourth side by a stove and a cupboard with only a narrow gap between. When the bladder calls at 3am, getting off the bed and into the toilet is quite the exercise.

To accomplish the first half of the manoeuvre – well, I don’t know if you’ve seen the Attenborough documentary about elephant seals on a mating beach. If so, you will have an accurate image of the method of locomotion required. For the second half, once the elephant seal has recovered its breath, imagine it rearing onto its back flippers and cramming its naked flesh into a telephone booth that’s far too small for it.

And there you have the romance of the road.