Parental guidance

Gap years no longer mean saying goodbye to your offspring for months at a time. Giles Kime jumps on the bandwagon and joins his daughter on her long-haul travels

- Giles Kime

AS excuses for a long-haul trip go, joining a much-missed teenager on their gap year seems pretty credible (make that ‘legit’, in gapyear parlance). Another is that offspring make the best guides; plenty of experience of family holidays mean that they understand your likes, dislikes, weak points, peccadillos.

Australia offers the best of so many worlds —a mix of buzzing, cosmopolitan Sydney and Melbourne to the more relaxed climes and natural beauty of the East Coast and the outback. I travelled with the help of Audley Travel (which also did the honours when I planned my honeymoon many years ago) and Singapore Airlines, flying via its eponymous city. My daughter had been living in Melbourne for eight months, working as a sports gappy at Trinity Grammar, a boys’ school on the leafy outskirts, and the city was the perfect place to cool my heels and acclimatise before we set off to our ultimate destination—Tasmania.

I’m not sure if a professional guide would have laid on a walking tour of Fitzroy, the capital of the southern hipster-sphere (Hackney, of course, being the capital of the northern hipster-sphere). It’s less commercial than the world’s other hipster hotspots, with no fashion brands or restaurant chains muscling in on the action, and has the relaxed feel that Notting Hill had before bankers’ bachelor pads usurped the bedsits.