Do you remember showering in your flip flops in a caravan park ablutions block? Did you find those long list of rules sign-posted outside the reception office hilarious? Have you ever spent a school holiday travelling with your family in a caravan? Terry and I did, which is why we developed Caravanland* (eons ago), a documentary about the world of caravanning in Australia, and the quirks, rituals, rites, and idiosyncrasies of caravan culture that we’d both recalled fondly from trips with our families as kids. To us, the caravan parks of our childhood were charming and the people that inhabited them were real characters. The parks were leafy and had manicured lawns and were often set by the sea or on lakes. One of my favourites had a creek running through it, shaded by willow trees, where everybody would catch yabbies. We recalled times walking barefoot down to the beach to go fishing or crabbing, sultry afternoons spent splashing around in swimming pools and mucking around with other kids in the playgrounds. It was all good fun. But caravan parks weren’t classless, as Viscount Coke suggested. We weren’t that naïve. It was obvious some families had bigger vans than others, some were more luxurious; the most impressive were those with a shower and toilet. It was clear which families were on holidays (the ones with small vans and pop-ups) and which ones were doing the big trip around Australia (vans over 30 feet plastered with stickers from places visited or maps of Australia painted on their rear.). It was also obvious who was living in the park by choice (the retirees who loved the social life and that they no longer had a big house to clean) and who wasn’t. But the thing was, none of it mattered. As a curious teenager that’s what I loved most, that I was meeting kids and adults from all walks of life, people we wouldn’t ordinarily get a chance to get to know in the ’burbs. The caravan park was a microcosm of Australian society. I thought that was pretty cool.

Pictured above is the beach at Monkey Mia, one of Western Australia's most tranquil. It's taken from the caravan and camping area at Monkey Mia Dolphin Resort.

In caravan- land* as much as anywhere there seems to be a desire to keep up with the Joneses. It apparently important to splash out when fitting out your van, especially if you’re just starting out: “Fridge freezers, ovens and grills are now standard fittings, along with cylindrical glass showers, and blow-air heating to warm the whole caravan. The advice in chat rooms for virgin caravanning families is to choose the most upmarket caravans to rent and ‘go for gold’ rather than the ‘basic or silver class,” according to The Times Emma Mahony. UK travel journalists encourage spending on cool accessories by using extravagant celebrities such as Jay Kay as inspiration: “Surely he is the embodiment of a one-man caravan makeover in his Knaus C Liner motorhome bought last year for £46,000, complete with bathroom, leather armchairs, flatscreen TV and sliding glass sunroof with an automatic rain sensor,” Mahony writes. (BTW: did you know some of these things even come with Swarovski crystal lighting? Check this out.) There’s a snobbish-ness to travel writing about caravans that I’ve reflected on in previous posts, a condescension you rarely read in other travel writing. Even when journalists appear to be objective, and even self deprecating, as The Sunday Times’ Emma Smith is in ‘How the motorhome changed gear and drove up cool street’, they can’t resist having a dig in the end: “Across the Atlantic motorhomes have long enjoyed an adventurous rock’n’roll image. Giant RVs or Winnebagos (even the names sound cool) bring to mind heady summer road trips across rugged country and the unrestricted freedom of a wide-open highway. In Britain the motorhome was traditionally about as glam as Bagnor, with all the wild pioneering spirit of Mary Whitehouse. Our motorhomes were cheap, cramped and naff. Something even caravanners could look down on.” (My italics). UK travel journos must have been relieved to discover a caravanning aristocrat. Caravanners themselves reveal there's a class system in caravanland with certain distinguishing signs, as Mahony reports: “As one mother reassuring a new caravanning recruit said rather bluntly about Haven Holidays: “Haven Holidays equals men with tattooed hands and young girls with buggyies and fags hanging out of their mouth. Center Parcs equals 2.4 children, MPVs and North Face jackets. I’ve done them both and while Haven was not really my cup of tea, my four-year-old daughter preferred it.” And the children do seem to love the Liliputian bedrooms, the caravanning camaraderie and the swimming pools on site,” she admits, before having another dig: “Nor does caravanning have to be so downmarket any longer. Southlands Camping Park on the Isle of Wight recently attracted a five-star rating, including the David Bellamy Gold Conservation Award for its wildflowers and 1,200 willows.” Unfortunately this kind of travel writing reveals more about the writers than it does about travel, conservation or the socio-economics of caravanning.

Pictured? One caravan whose owners didn't make an effort to keep up with the Joneses.

* caravanland: see next post

Motorhome tourists get haircuts at the local barber, shop at local markets and buy more souvenirs from the places they go to see: "They never want to stay in just one place, and unlike the tourists taking advantage of the cheap ‘everything included’ system we see in many of our hotels, they don’t only stay a short time and then return to their countries,” Bulent Karaboncuk, the head of the Turkey Camping and Motor Home Association, said in ‘Four-wheeled holiday pleasure around Turkey’s hidden treasures’ in Sunday’s Zaman. Karaboncuk is campaigning to convince his compatriots to develop motorhome tourism in Turkey, a country that so far only has 20 campsites, by promoting the benefits to the local community: “People who come to tour a country with their motor homes tend to stay longer than other kinds of tourists and tend to mix more with the people of the country they are visiting,” he says. Karaboncuk is also trying to persuade Turks to buy a motorhome rather than a summer house in a coastal development, a growing trend among Turks as much as foreigners: “A holiday in a motor home is actually a way of life. European citizens actually spend their entire holiday in their motor homes… in the summer, the roads are full of motor homes.” However, Karaboncuk says, he’s meeting some resistance: “Unfortunately… we seem to be blind to the importance of this kind of tourism and have set up all sorts of blockades to it.” Onur Onurmen of Can Karavan is resorting to the promotion of creature comforts to increase motorhome sales: “Mobile homes offer the possibility of unlimited comforts in a smaller environment… we are seeing things like plasma televisions and satellite systems in motor homes these days,” Like the rest of the world, it seems in Turkey the comforts of home are important to people, no matter where they are.

Camping, camper- vanning and caravanning are so incredibly popular in the UK now and have such wide appeal they're even attracting aristocrats. That’s right! According to a January article in The Sunday Times: “A few years ago, the trend-watchers would have happily sent camping and caravanning holidays the way of the tinned pilchard and string vest,” (reporter Cally Law obviously slept through the cool camping craze and hasn't heard of Agyness Deyn, singlehandedly responsible for bringing the string vest back into fashion again), however, Law tells us the Camping and Caravanning Club membership has grown 44% in the past 10 years while the Caravan Club has experienced a 33% increase. The cause? The unpleasantness of air travel (surely an understatement after the recent Heathrow T5 debacle?) and a rediscovery of UK attractions: “Not that the kind of families used to the comfort and convenience which hotel living provides will have to rough it... Standards have been rising in response to a more demanding customer profile,” Law says, and as evidence: “At Ayr Holiday Park in St Ives, Cornwall, for example, the lavatory blocks have mosaic floors and piped music.” But of course they do! We already knew this - we read it in that April 2006 BBC story ‘Why the British Carry on Camping’ which I blogged about the other day: “The toilets at Ayr Holiday Park in St Ives, Cornwall, for example, have mosaic floors, heating and piped music.” Law goes on to enlighten us: we could “spend a whopping £250,000 on a motorhome - or get rolling in a caravan for just £10,000. Most modern tents are cheap, light, simple to erect and keep you snug all night long, whatever the weather.” (Huh?!) “Even the vocabulary is new,” she continues, “caravans are now tourers, static caravans are holiday homes and camp sites have become holiday and touring parks.” (Really?) Law informs us that: “Viscount Coke, 42, of Holkham Hall on the north Norfolk coast, is an enthusiastic caravanner." He's also owner of Pinewoods Holiday Park on his estate at Wells-next-the-Sea, a British Holiday & Home Parks Association (BH&HPA) member and Caravan Club president. Law writes: "When he was a child, he and his family used to spend all their holidays under canvas, and often visited his grandmother at her static caravan at Mother Ivey’s Bay in north Cornwall. “We had a whale of a time running about with the other children,” he says. “It’s classless, it’s safe, you are in a family park where lots of the owners know each other and it’s about location, location, location." It's all making sense now. Coke owns “550 holiday homes at Pinewoods, including 12 luxury wooden lodges overlooking Holkham National Nature Reserve”. I wonder if the Viscount issued that 2006 press release everyone seems to be quoting from? Is he the one we thank for getting us all back to nature? I have no problem with ‘posh camping’ although it's not as catchy as ‘cool camping’ – it’s lazy travel journalism I have the problem with. I do like the Viscount's 1965 22ft Airstream Safari. Nice.

The luxury tent pictured is at Karijini Eco-Retreat in Karijini National Park, Western Australia.

The cool camping cool caravanning hype may have convinced style-conscious travellers to get out of the city and get away to the country to pitch a tent for a weekend or two, but did it really fuel some kind of fashionable camping revival? Had camping ever become chic in the first place or was it just a clever bit of marketing that the travel media perhaps embraced a little too enthusiastically? It was a fresh and novel idea after all. And let’s admit it, ‘cool camping’ has a ring to it, don’t you think? Fortunately, one travel writer decided to find out if people were really sleeping under deer skins in daisy-patterned tents and how much things had really changed. For “What, no yurt?”, The Guardian's self-styled ‘urban pansy’ Benji Lanyado set off for Blackberry Wood, the coolest UK campsite according to Jonathan Knight's Cool Camping bible. Lanyado discovered that Blackberry Wood (despite its charming name) was actually “blissfully free of posh tents and designer wellies”. The reality, he found, was that it was just a good old-fashioned camping spot - only after the re-branding, it got busier. And that’s the thing about camping, it’s just a plain old-fashioned travel experience, a great way to escape everyday life and get out and enjoy nature. It’s simply good fun. Did it ever need to be sold as the next sexy travel trend? As Knight himself wrote in The Times' ‘Britain’s Perfect Pitches’: “Its very appeal lies in its contrast with our modern lives, in the chance to lose electricity, the traffic, the television and telephone for a while. Chilling in the countryside, sleeping under the stars and breathing clean, fresh air, is a rich and recharging experience…” If there's been one positive outcome from travel writers’ fixation with camping’s cool factor, it's that the mainstream media now devotes more column inches and web pages to the activity than ever before. The Times even has a dedicated section solely devoted to Camping and Caravanning. Now that has to be a good thing, right?

Pictured is our tent on platform, with double bed and bathroom, which we stayed in at El Questro's Emma Gorge. More impressive than the accommodation were the stunning bush surroundings and birdsong outside your (canvas) door.

“Hands up if you traded in the Airstream – for a Gypsy Caravan?” The Times asked in The Family Bandwagon. This article must take the cake in a long line of silly stories over the last couple of years by lazy travel writers who all too keenly latched on to the cool camping cool caravanning phenomenon, freely quoting from the same press releases (well, that’s what they’re there for, right, is what they’re thinking) and borrowing ideas from each other. Don't get me wrong, I do think gypsy caravans are pretty cool. Check out these prettily-painted wooden wagons at Gypsy Caravans, these cosy things at the Gypsy Caravan Company, and these darlings at Gypsy Waggons, which, incidentally, are a favourite with legendary guitarist Ronnie Wood (and I’m surprised that juicy tidbit didn’t make it into the article, seeing celebrities can be credited with giving caravanning and camping the makeover it needed). Regardless, you have to agree this story is rather ridiculous: “First camping went upmarket - now it is the turn of caravanning,” Emma Mahony writes, “Who remembers when camping holidays were just wall-to-wall nylon from the sleeping bag to the kitchen area, and one match lit in the wrong place could spell the end of your holiday? Your children? Probably not. They are more likely to think of camping as a cotton yurt experience with luxury kilims on the floor and a cedar-wood barbecue area outside.” Really? (My comment of dismay). “But just as camping has had a successful image makeover, with Cath Kidston tents (Oh, no, not again! Me again) and family festival-goers, so caravans are now looking to have their face lift.” Gypsy caravans, Mahony tells us, are the hottest thing in caravanning: “Ignoring the fact that fashion stylists have been using the rural Gypsy Caravan for years, elbowing the real Romany couple to one side in order to drape clothes over models…” (Oh, c’mon now.) “Suddenly those same gypsy caravans are having their wheels oiled and being offered up, complete with lessons in horse care, as venues for family holidays… In Wales the static Romany originals are suddenly so popular that companies such as Under the Thatch, offering its gypsy caravans at £329 per week, have no availability until October. Real show-offs are even buying their own from Gypsy Caravans.” Cute idea and everything, but I have to ask, how many gypsy caravans have you seen on the road? And would you buy one?

Travel by caravan, RV or kombi may be just as cool as camping if vehicle registrations and club member- ships are anything to go by, but to the travel media it’s cooler to write about camping – unless the caravan is expensive, luxuriously fitted out, comes with quirky extras or retro-cool packaging, or is simply not a caravan. For the travel media it’s more palatable for travellers to camp than to caravan. Even though travel writers are perfectly willing to jump on the cool camping/cool caravanning bandwagon, employ the same buzz words, regurgitate the same press releases, and borrow ideas from each other. If they have to write about caravanning it must be qualified and if the traveller must caravan, then they must do it in a luxe vintage model or retro van with kitsch value. (Despite campers being allowed to pitch £50 tents.) Take The Observer’s much-critiqued (by me) Cool Camping article where we’re told “...the lowly mobile home has had a Changing Rooms moment.” (My italics.) And: “Also on the continent, Belrepayre Airstream & Retro Camping is more trailer flash than trailer trash.” Ouch! (My italics again.) The story continues: “Closer to home, Vintage Vacations rents out three shiny Airstream trailers on a farm on the Isle of Wight. With interiors more suited to the pages of Wallpaper* magazine than Butlins, this is the UK's swankiest camping experience.” But “if you really want to be mobile, Scooby Campers has just set up shop... Rental of its re-conditioned VW campervans (which come with cream leather upholstery, SatNav and a CD of Sixties 'Scoobymusic' to set you on your way) starts from £250 for a three-night weekend and similar companies are springing up around Britain. Be warned though, that 'mobile' is a relative concept; budding Jenson Buttons need not apply." I don't know about you, but I'm not a fan of snobby writing and derogatory language doesn't have a place in travel writing. Call me a snob but I prefer an Airstream to a daisy-patterned tent any day, however, I'd happily camp in either and gladly write about both on equal terms. Isn't the important thing that they allow us to travel? Isn't that cool enough in itself?

Okay, if I have to choose an Airstream then I'm opting for The International Line and the Ocean Breeze please. Check out the photos. Call me a hypocrite, it's retro-cool, I know.

So then, is caravanning really cool? The UK media told us it was back in 2004 when The Guardian assured us it was safe to mention the c-word. For ‘Go on admit it, my van’s the man’, writer Tom Templeton spent a weekend driving a sleek silver 'teardrop of a caravan' and was converted. It wasn’t only the cute design of the 520 kilo T@B van that persuaded him, but that he'd stayed in scenic Caravan Club sites such as Kentsford Farm,“a vast and beautiful orchard, trees groaning with cider apples, begging to be scrumped, peacocks, guinea fowls and strange turkey-like ducks grimble around the place, a brook babbles past...” He concluded: “I can see the appeal of caravanning. Basically you pitch up, hand over a fiver, untether your caravan, wind out the legs in a process that lasts about five minutes and, with the night's billet secure and snug, are then free to head off on an adventure - or alternatively make a cup of tea.” But when Tom asked friends how cool caravanning was, two theories emerged: “One, that it's like having an ugly best friend - surrounding yourself with uncool stuff makes you look all the cooler. Two, that caravanning is cool in a retro, hippyish kind of way, with overtones of the traveller movement and circuses.” Two years later The Observer's Gemma Bowes explained ‘How Caravans Became Cool’. “It's official: caravanning is now cool,” she wrote, “Style magazines have long been celebrating the retro charms of the caravan, but figures from the Caravan Club confirm that holidays on wheels are enjoying something of a revival.” According to the Club, which had almost 1,000,000 million members, caravanning was the most popular paid-for UK holiday, accounting for 17% of vacations in Britain. The 2006 summer heatwave and security crisis at UK airports contributed to the popularity surge, along with high-profile members and a new generation of enthusiasts such as Kate Moss, Sean Penn, Nicole Richie, Jamie Oliver, and Lenny Kravitz, who'd given it a makeover. “Caravanning has become very fashionable,” said the Club spokesperson, “Young couples who want to go surfing or travelling are trying it, as are families and retirees, and it's been made stylish by the revival of the VW Campervan and designer Airstream caravan.” Or, as the manager of the International Caravan and Motorhome Show said: “It is no longer Carry on Camping, bad cabarets and tin boxes on wheels.” A year later the Mirror was insisting “Caravanning's cool (honest): Cheap flights to Europe are so 2006… just ask the growing list of celebrities who are choosing caravans instead of crowded airports.” The star factor was clearly what made caravanning cool for The Mirror: “Next time you're trapped behind a caravan on a country road, mocking its boring occupants, just think... it's as likely to be Billie Piper or Helen Mirren holding you up as a geeky guy from the Caravan Club.” With an estimated four million Brits a year caravanning, it was more popular than ever. “That's right,” The Mirror told us, “there's now nothing cooler than a caravan.”

Caravanning around Australia and ‘full- timing’ by RV in the USA was once the domain of grey nomads, adventurous families setting out to give their kids some real life lessons, and middle-aged couples looking for a sea change. But caravanners and campervanners are getting younger so it seems. Travel around Australia and you’ll see foreign 20-to-30-something couples driving a hired Britz campervan and gap year backpackers trading the hop-on-hop-off-bus for a psychedelic painted Wicked Campers kombi van. You only have to take a quick look at their websites to see who they’re marketing their products to - a very different audience to the campervanners of a decade or so ago. In the USA, the average age of an RV owner is 49, yet they’re apparently getting younger there too. Take a look at 12 feet, an inspiring travel blog by San Francisco-based travellers Rikki and Chris, two guys who, after a clash of schedules and cancelled Alaska travel plans, spontaneously rented an RV to explore the Nevada deserts. “We loved it so much we ended up buying our own,” Rikki tells me. “For some reason there was this need to disprove that RV travelling is only for old people,” he admits, “And now our friends, co-workers and families all agree: it is cool. How else can you go places, be out enjoying nature, travel with your pets, and be in the safety and comfort of your own home all at the same time? I think in the US, RV travelling is becoming popular and 'mod' again. More and more families, younger groups, and couples are travelling on the road rather than flying (a fact after 9-11). We wouldn't mind living in the RV if we were able to travel full-time. That's how much we love the RV and the experience of travelling in it!”

Becoming ‘a citizen of the road’ is a big part of the appeal of caravanning. For the 8 million American households that have a recreational vehicle, or RV, ‘it’s not just a vehicle, it’s a lifestyle’. And taking to the road on a permanent vacation has never been more popular despite the rocketing fuel prices, according to the recent USA Today article: RVs Beckon Baby Boomers Despite Fuel Costs. In Australia, caravanning is also experiencing something of a revival (see yesterday’s post and the Sydney Morning Herald story: Paradise Fills Up Fast for Nomads), where some 300,000 RVs are registered and up to 80,000 are thought to be touring at any one time - not a small number when you consider the country's tiny population. In the USA, the idea of ‘full-timing’ (as the RVers refer to permanent travelling) is increasingly appealing to a population fed up with airport hassles and flight delays. So much so that the industry predicts a boom in sales as a generation of baby boomers begin to make retirement decisions. ‘Home is where you park it’ was the slogan on a t-shirt spotted by the USA Today reporter at a recent rally where RVs ranged from humble, collapsible, canvas-walled camping trailers (known as ‘pop-ups’ in Australia) to luxurious 45 foot motor homes equipped with king-sized beds and state-of-the-art entertainment systems, and price tags from US$15,000 to $1.5 million. The owners of the old vans parked on this simple camping site (pictured), splendidly situated on a fertile cliff top on the Arkamas Peninsula in Cyprus, certainly weren't concerned with cutting-edge sound - and who would be with the soundtrack of the ocean for background music? - but I bet they'd proudly wear those t-shirts.

My childhood memories of Easter: painting hard-boiled eggs red with my Russian baboushka; gluing pastel coloured cotton wool balls onto a silly hat (um, I mean, helping my mum make my Easter bonnet for the class competition); aching legs from standing for hours in the incense-filled Russian Orthodox church; wondering why my Easter bonnet didn’t win; concentrating on holding my candle upright so as not to spill hot wax on myself as we circled the Russian church (it was midnight); hunting for chocolate-shaped bunnies and eggs my dad had hidden in our backyard; and, naturally, eating chocolate, for days so it seemed. My memories are hazy; scrambled together are moments from two separate Easters, the Western Christian Easter we celebrated with the rest of Australia, and 13 days later, the Eastern Orthodox festivities my mother’s Russian side of the family observed. What is clear, though, is that Easter holidays usually involved family caravanning trips away. We’d tow the van to leafy caravan parks by the beach in small towns on the New South Wales coast with strange Australian names like Yamba, Tuncurry, and Mollymook. High on our list of priorities were fishing, swimming, sun, and seafood. By day we’d be on a boat or on the beach and in the evenings we’d be cooking barbeques by the van and playing monopoly or cards before bed. The parks were crammed with families who all had the same idea, to catch the last of the warm weather before autumn (fall) set in, so there’d always be long lines for the showers and toilets in the morning, plenty of other children to play with, and people for my folks to have a drink with after I was in bed. In those days, we called and booked our site a few days in advance, sometimes we even rocked up on the day. Either way, we nearly always got an excellent site within splashing distance of the sea. Or at least close enough to be able to walk barefoot down to the beach, and to fall asleep listening to the waves crashing on the shore. But I've already told you enough about my caravanning youth. These days, Australian families book a year in advance for school holidays, and there's such a shortage of parks that government land is being acquired to build more. The Australian economy is booming, Australian families could travel anyway they please. So is caravanning experiencing a renaissance? Take a read: Paradise Fills Up Fast for Nomads.

As a child, my parents dragged me around Australia in a caravan for five years. My dad had been diagnosed as having kidney disease and in those days the option was dialysis machine or die. He didn't want to be hooked up to a machine, he told us. If he was going to go, he said, he wanted to see his country before he died. So we sold up everything we had in Sydney, and we took to the road. We had a caravan so massive that it deserved the title 'mobile home', as they call them in the USA. It had separate bedrooms for my parents at one end and my sister and I at the other, with a dining-living area and bathroom in between. Wherever we went people stared and when we pulled up at a caravan park or camping ground, they'd come over for a chat, the blokes asking my dad technical questions ("how much juice does she chew?") and the women asking mum, enviously, if they could stick there head in for a snoop. It wasn't the kind of thing people towed around the country in those days (the late 1970s to early 1980s), but that's exactly what we did, travelling the length and breadth of Australia in those five years. We lived off my parents savings and investments, and Mum and Dad picked up work when opportunities arose... grape picking, shark fishing, and so on. My sister was a toddler but I did correspondence school, eagerly collecting my assignments and library books from prearranged post offices, having 'holidays' when we were on the road, and working hard to make up for the breaks when we settled down somewhere for a while. But the travel itself was the best education of all. We met so many different types of people every day and were confronted with such wildly different kinds of lifestyles. I had to quickly learn how to adapt to fit in. We stopped at places we liked for as long as we liked, and we moved on when we had experienced enough. Or simply missed being on the road. Because we all loved the road, Mum, Dad, my sister, and I. We loved the whole ritual of packing up and hooking the van on to the car and just taking off... we even had a theme song, Willy Nelson's 'On The Road Again', and Dad would pop in the tape as soon as we hit the bitumen. There's something so appealing about traveling in a caravan as I was reminded when we came across this quaint old van parked on an empty paddock in the Arkamas Peninsula, Cyprus. After so many five star hotels with their tedious check in procedures, the well-appointed rooms to inspect, and the expansive buffet breakfasts to try, for the first time in many years, I found myself craving a far simpler traveling experience, that by caravan...