TRAVEL: A man, a plan, a caravan

Paul Little loves his caravan. And he's happy for the world to know it.

The plan was to have three caravans. I am bach-averse the mortgages, the mowing, the monotony of having to go to the same place every time the holidays roll around. But I am married to someone who would have very much liked a bach; someone who, in fact, would own a bach by now if I had not dug in my heels more than once in the further reaches of the Kaipara, on the road to Hokianga or half way through the weekend newspaper real-estate supplements.

Because I like to give the appearance of reasonableness, I continued to allow myself to be dragged along to view baches, my heels becoming increasingly worn down as the years went by. And that is how I came to be a caravan owner. One busy Friday morning in 2004, my father-in-law, who had been visiting a small, relatively isolated Bay of Plenty campground regularly with his own caravan since he and my mother-in-law had discovered it, rang to say he had found just the bach for us. Neat.

So we got ourselves down there and inspected the bach. We had been promised that it was absolute waterfront and would be available on a long-term lease at a very good price. On an estuary, it turned out to be extremely waterfront. If it had been any more waterfront, it would have been a submarine. But this waterfront was so tidal that the terms of the lease could have been as generous as that under which the US holds on to Guantanamo Bay, we still wouldn't have been interested.

However, there was no denying the prettiness of the spot, its seductive air of calm and quiet, the remoteness of the region. It is on the road to nowhere. If you come here, it is because this is where you want to be, not because you are on the way to somewhere else. There is no somewhere else here, to misquote Gertrude Stein.

So that summer we agreed to rent one of the on-site caravans for a week. Somewhat to my wife's surprise. Over the first few days of this stay I felt the subject of a strange scrutiny. "Why do you keep

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