spring 2020
During the July school holidays, the kids and I heeded the government’s suggestion to support domestic tourism. We flew into Queenstown airport, hired a campervan and visited some of New Zealand’s best tourist spots like Queenstown mall, Cardrona Ski resort, Lake Wanaka and Milford Sound. Things to see and do were cheap and we snapped up the opportunities, shoulder to shoulder with many, many other domestic tourists. We flew out of Queenstown Airport a week later, with our cameras full of photos, our backpacks full of souvenirs and our stomachs full of glorious food.
One thing which is never cheap in New Zealand, even during a pandemic, is dining out. Up until a few years ago we wouldn’t have spent much money on dining out on holidays anyway, because the lack of vegetarian options at restaurants in many towns and cities has taken a bit of fun out of the experience. One can only eat so many of the token vegetarian pasta dishes before they become so boring it’s not worth it any more. The notable exceptions have been Christchurch, Dunedin and Coromandel, which apparently have enough of a vegetarian population to make it worth having several permanent vegetarian restaurants.
It gets more tricky when travelling with children. Restaurants often supply the adults with a regular menu and the children with what they call a “Kids Menu.” I have found very few restaurants which have anything on the “Kids Menu” which doesn’t involve meat. A typical example of the options on one of these menus might be chicken nuggets, fish & chips or ham & cheese pizza.
My youngest, now 10, has got used to asking for, “fish and chips without the fish,” while my eldest, 11, politely asks the waiter for an adult menu.
The thing about the adult menu is I’ve noticed an increase in vegetarian dishes appearing over the years – and a slower increase in vegan dishes, or at least meals which can be tweaked to make vegan. This shows the industry is responding to research which shows New Zealanders are actively seeking out less meat and more plant-based options for meals when dining out.
There’s still a bit of catching up to do, such as a café we stopped at which accidentally had a sign labelling their sausage rolls as vegetarian rolls. We were sceptical and asked a staff member if it was true, only to be told they’d accidentally put the wrong sign on the sausage rolls. We could have been tricked, especially since there are quite a few plant-based meat alternatives popping up which look a lot like meat.
That near miss prompted me to tell my children a story about the time I was on a guided tour in Northern Australia and our tour guide crushed up some ants and offered them to us. The other people in my group ate them and exclaimed how much they tasted like lemonade. I declined to eat them, explaining that I don’t eat animals, which prompted the tour guide to tease me and call me a scaredy-cat. I realise when my children get old enough to travel on their own, they will need to be prepared to look for hazards such as sneaky meat fillings, mislabelled products and tour guides who don’t get it. However, I’m also noticing how quickly things are changing. In the world my children are growing up in there’s much more awareness of what and how we’re eating.
In summary, I like the progress I’m seeing in the tourism industry. More plant-based meals, more awareness, more tolerance. Travelling with vegetarian kids is becoming pleasingly easy.