A couple’s first home together is a memorable and exciting step. Taking the plunge into serious coupledom and the restricted ability to be able to escape from one another. I suppose that this usually involves one person moving into the other’s home or going out flat and house hunting together to find a place to start anew.

Our foray into this journey of coupledom was slightly less orthodox – we moved into a temperamental old Volkswagen Kombi campervan on the other side of the world. A move from living separately to sharing a space measuring approximately two feet by eight feet. I guess this was slightly do or die wasn’t it? But I loved our first home together, our little love bucket of rust.

It was 2001 and we were in Cairns, Queensland. We had a travellers’ visa to stay in Australia for a year and soon decided that having a campervan offered more freedom – and better sanitation – than bouncing from youth hostel to youth hostel. We had a look at a few vans, narrowly missed buying one in bright yellow (I still haven’t made my peace with this), and settled on our Tangerine Dream, a Volkswagen Kombi. It was old, battered, bright orange with go-faster stripes, and perfect. We gutted it as it was rather grubby and grotty and in need of a very thorough clean inside and out. I had been working as a chambermaid in a hostel and they lent me all the cleaning supplies needed to transform a stinky van into a home of great beauty.  It probably needed fumigating to be honest but that option wasn’t at our disposal.

I handmade curtains in purple and blue and my husband rigged up a tarp that rolled up for driving but quickly unfurled with poles to create an outdoor area attached to the van. We got so proficient at packing up and unpacking that we could do it in a matter of minutes, we were a well-oiled machine; it was a bit like a Transformer – first home in disguise. We had a little oven with a couple of hotplates, you could cook a roast in there if you wanted and it was brilliant. And we had a three-way Esky which is a big ice box that you could run off the battery, fill with ice blocks, or plug into power.  There was a little table and chairs which transformed into a bed within minutes and a pop-up top to create more room. It was fabulous.

We also had a snorkel on the back of the van. Nope, that’s not a typo, it actually had a snorkel. We never tested it out but allegedly it protected the engine (which is in the boot of a kombi, not at the front) in the event of driving through deep water. I love the fact that our Tangerine Dream was (allegedly) a sub-aquatic vehicle that would have done James Bond proud. It was also a rarity and a talking point; “what’s that on the back of your van, it looks like a snorkel ….”.

However the inside of our little home didn’t cope as well with water. There was a leak somewhere and if you parked the wrong way around on a slope then water was funnelled down onto our mattress. A soft light foam mattress becomes unexpectedly heavy when totally saturated with water, something that happened regularly when travelling around the sub-tropical portion of Australia. One or both of us would wake up, absolutely soaked through, on a squishy wet mattress. Then followed the challenge of trying to lift it out of the van and carry it to somewhere to dry off for the next day. Usually we could park the ‘right’ way around but if the power output was on the other side of a camp spot then we had to just surrender to the flooding.

We travelled miles in that beautiful little first home of ours. From Cairns, down the entire east coast of Australia to Melbourne. And when we settled in Sydney for several years and upgraded to a flat, then a townhouse, but we kept Tange and took her away for visits to the Blue Mountains, Canberra, camping trips. There were times when we’d camp in the middle of nowhere and have kangeroos bouncing around the van and it’d be so remote that I was too scared to visit the toilet block in the middle of the night, so we set up our own bleach based toilet system in the van. 

As Tange grew older she started to develop intermittent faults and would randomly break down. There was a huge steering wheel that looked like a bus wheel, and a strange handbrake which was bow shaped that you had to pull out horizontally from the dashboard with great gusto. Both eventually started to develop faults. It broke my heart when we had to sell her but it just wasn’t practical to keep her as we found we used her less and less. I think we sold her for parts in the end. Tange’s life with us was the end of her vehicular journey and boy did she go out with a bang.

Our Tangerine Dream was a treasure trove of happy memories. She was the first vehicle that we owned together, our first home together, our first experience of living abroad together. We covered around 2000 happy miles in our leaking, temperamental, beautiful van. Whenever I listen to Men at Work’s ‘Down Under’ and hear the line ‘travelling in a fried out kombi, on a hippie trail, head full of zombie’ I think back fondly to those halcyon days on the open road.