Traveller trinketry

When adventuring (block your ears Sir Ed), the best bits be the souvenir and gift shops. There, encapsulated in a few square metres, is the whole museum or city, or sometimes, even country. It is a world where plastic meets fantastic, where Union Jacks are tortured into all manner of shapes or forms and where King Kong is larger than the Empire State Building. Ducks wear the crown jewels, Eiffel Towers are shrunk and twisted, posted and pasted. In New Zealand, the very beautiful paua shell is entombed in dollops of shiny, come-hither plastic.

All this travel trinkery to wrench the travel dollar from the unsuspecting tourist who may suffer delusions of grandeur, that these little trinkets will look quite magnificent on the mantelpiece back home.

But before you even lay your first coins on some far-away counter to claim that miniaturised prize, there is a little travel temple much closer to your doorstep. It is, I've no idea what it's called, the "traveller's column" perhaps. There, in a pharmacy or department store, is the rotating display unit, where travel "things" are balanced and jammed. This leads the unwary traveller to believe that everything on the stand is needed for the great big adventure yawning in the not too distant future.

We were ensnared.

A lovely orange, bean filled pillow, perfect for delayed travellers or when aero-snoozing. It could be just a little orange pillow, or just unzip and squidge the beans along and you have a neck-resty pillow. What genius thought of such a thing? (Time could probably be better invested in world peace but I digress). It quickly became a burden.

The travel wallet nearly garotted me (these things should really come with instructions). When the zip stuck, an emergency caesar was needed to birth the spare credit card. The Samsonite nearly caused an international incident but that's another story.

And so it goes on, with hand luggage weighted down with aero-potions and wipes, eye-drops and nasal sprays. Funny on the way home, these little must-haves have usually made it into a bin somewhere, often unopened, on now far-away soil.

But alas, although many tourists treats may end up in "that" kitchen drawer where things are put that might be useful post-armageddon, there is the post-holiday display.

Currently on a little sideboard, in a little villa in an Auckland suburb, a diamonte Eiffel Tower twinkles, King Kong hugs the Empire State and a tiny Sacré-Cœur is waiting to grow up. 

Alas, the world on the our doorstep. What a treat.