The Campervan

Ane, Iker and Jon had been friends since elementary school in Bilbao. After university, they all got working holiday visas for Australia, and after six months picking fruit and washing dishes in Perth, they had saved enough money for the best part of the trip: a road trip down the coast. They only needed one thing. A campervan.

The vans at the rental companies were modern, clean and comfortable, but they were also much more expensive than the friends could afford. So they looked online, and that was how they met Dave, a surfer with long gray hair who was selling the cheapest campervan in Perth.

It was not hard to see why. The van was older than all three of them together. It was painted bright yellow, with pink and green flowers on the sides and a big smiling sun on the back door. It was the most colorful vehicle they had ever seen, and probably the ugliest. "She's slower than a tired kangaroo," Dave admitted, "but she's never let me down." Jon fell in love immediately. Ane and Iker were less sure, but the price was the lowest they had seen, so they shook hands.

They called her Banana. Dave was right: she was the slowest thing on the road. On the hills, cyclists passed them. Trucks honked at them. Once, a grandmother on a mobility scooter seemed to be going faster than them, although Iker said that was impossible. Their top speed was eighty kilometers an hour, with the wind behind them.

But Banana had other qualities. Because she was so slow, they saw more than the other travelers. They stopped at every beach, and each one seemed whiter and emptier than the one before. In Margaret River they slept next to a forest of the tallest trees they had ever seen. Near Albany, they watched whales from a cliff. At Lucky Bay, kangaroos came down to the beach in the morning and stood next to the van as if they wanted a ride.

Banana also made them famous. People waved at them, took photos of them and wanted to talk. A family from Germany invited them to dinner. A group of older surfers gave them free advice about the best waves. "Nobody talks to the people in the white vans," Ane said one night. "Everybody talks to us."

Of course, there were problems. The radio only played one station. The back door opened by itself on bumpy roads, and one morning the engine refused to start until Jon spoke to it kindly for ten minutes. It was the most stressful morning of the trip, and also the funniest.

Three weeks later, when they sold Banana to two students from Italy, Jon almost cried. "She's slower, older and uglier than any van in Australia," he told the new owners. "But trust me, she's the best one."