I’ve previously remarked in these pages that if you close your eyes and step into the street in Hong Kong, chances are you’ll be hit by either a Rolls Royce or a taxi. In Singapore it would be either a single decker or double decker bus. Now I’ve discovered that stepping into the Pacific Highway in New South Wales would result in a losing encounter with a humongous truck, a campervan or an SUV towing a caravan. The CB and I have just driven on said highway for about 7 hours south from the Queensland border over two days. Now I know why there is apparently a waiting list for new caravans. I read this somewhere. All of those available have been sold. And they’re all on this road. The CB and I lived in one for 6 months during my first foray into full time work post-university in 1977, at a small copper mine with no accommodation for us so we had to take our own. That was the end of our caravanning experience if you ignore a short holiday a few years later which confirmed that these living arrangements are just too close to camping for the CB and she doesn’t do camping under any circumstances. We once stayed in a tent in the Sahara Desert but it had a shower and a flush toilet (I had to upgrade to the luxury model) so didn’t really count.

Having arrived in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, one of Australia’s premier wine producing regions, we were keen to get into it, so to speak. It’s now the next day and we did get into it although in a relatively civilised way, like camping in the Sahara. Our wine tour commenced at 11.30am and concluded at 5.00pm. I’m not necessarily one who likes to comply with conventional norms but wine tasting at 9.00am is stretching things a tad. So one pre-lunch and more than one post-lunch is definitely the way to go.

There were ten in our group – a young couple who I surmised (with absolutely no justification) were expanding their repertoire from tequila and beer to chardonnay and gin, a couple who were very familiar with cellar doors like the CB and I, and four twenty something females on a girls’ weekend. The young couple kept their distance and were pretty quiet. The other pair were like us – interested in the history of the area and, without getting too snobby because wine is Housewives of New York snobby, interested in the wine culture of the region. The four young ladies deserve a paragraph of their own.

A wine tour involves getting in and out of a vehicle which seems pretty straightforward until you realise that it’s not when you have the equivalent of 6 glasses of wine in the bag. There may even be a bit of walking involved – round wine making facilities ie vats and kegs and wine growing facilities ie vines. So nightclub wear and heels are not recommended. When the nightclub wear includes a floppy top that allows floppy bits to flop out, who am I to complain. If you want to wear what amounts to high cut white swimsuit under a sheer nylon curtain, break a leg. And by 11.30am, I think the four young ladies may have been a few aperol spritzes ahead of the rest of us judging by the giggling and their totally ignoring the poor driver’s local area commentary. She may as well have been speaking in Esperanto for all the attention she was getting from the back of the bus. But they were sweet, once they settled down.

At the end of the day three of us got an eye-full as well as a few nice wines, three others sampled some nice wines and weren’t interested in the eye-full and the other four no doubt continued their young ladiies’ knees-up until the next day when they had to head home and stagger back to work on Monday.