‘I DON’T like isolation on a holiday; I prefer to experience the bustling life
and soul of a place. I find Indonesia very interesting and I especially love
Bali. I’ve been there loads, because from Australia it is only a five-hour
flight away. I love the spirituality, the Hindu culture, the architecture,
the mountains and the surfing.
I first went aged 19 with my girlfriend. We had a great time until we both got
sick. We must just have eaten at the wrong place. I was told by local people
that if I bought an over-the-counter tablet, which was a form of speed, it
would aid the recovery process.
It made sense to my 19-year-old brain, so we bought it and I spent the next
three days awake. It was quite an experience: we ended up seeing a few more
sunrises than we’d anticipated.
On a later holiday in Bali I hired a moped, as usual. We’d never had to wear
helmets before, but what I didn’t realise was that, apparently, the
Indonesian president’s son had recently bought a motorbike-helmet factory
and since then it had become illegal not to wear one.
I was stopped in the street by a policeman. In the end, I had to negotiate my
way out of it by slipping him a backhander – about $10 worth.
Living in Britain with children means Bali is not such a convenient holiday
destination nowadays. We like staying closer to home. In recent years, I’ve
really got into skiing. Last winter, we went to Courchevel in France. It
feels special in a fairy-tale way to be up in the snow-covered mountains.
Voices sound different and the fresh air cleans you out. A nice bottle of rosé
with lunch and it’s happy days. I love seeing my kids and my girlfriend
mastering skiing. Zac especially is so fearless it scares me – he loves the
jumps. I didn’t learn to ski as a child; my skiing career started quite late
in life.
When I was in Neighbours, the whole cast went to Thredbo, a ski resort halfway
between Sydney and Melbourne, to do a publicity shoot, and we stayed on
afterwards for a couple of days of skiing. I took to it straightaway.
It is quite common for surfers to adapt well to the snow. I spent most of my
youth hitching a lift from Melbourne to Bells Beach to surf a break called
Winkipop. After that, I went on regular surfing holidays with my
schoolfriend James Maguire. Back in 1993, when I was in Joseph, we met in
Sri Lanka.
We were staying in Hikkaduwa, which is about 100km south of Colombo. James had
brought a specially made surfboard for me from Australia. I pulled it out of
the case in my hotel room under one of those ceiling fans. The big joke was
that they’d called it Mr Loin Cloth, and I was so busy looking at it,
saying, “Wow, what a fantastic board”, that I almost lifted it up through
the fan blades. James grabbed it in the nick of time.
I didn’t really do surfing holidays with girlfriends; I thought a Club Med
holiday in Tahiti would be better. I took a girlfriend back in the mid1980s,
but it was a huge mistake. We had to do everything communally; it wasn’t for
me. I remember sitting in our room while a dance class was going on outside.
The music was Locomotion by Kylie Minogue. I was in Neighbours at the time and
I thought: “Oh no.” We packed our bags, flew back to Sydney and spent the
second half of our holiday driving along the coast instead.
I was brought up mainly by my father, and my greatest childhood holiday was
when he took me to LA. My dad’s an actor too and we went to see Universal
Studios, Disneyland and some of his friends. He bought me my first computer
game, which in those days was a dot on the screen moving up and down. I
remember going to the reception of our hotel, asking for a Snickers bar and
getting change of a dime from two quarters. I was nine at the time; it was
so exciting.
I want to keep that sense of wonder when I go away; I don’t want to become
complacent about holidays and end up going to the same places every year.
I’d like to keep exploring. That’s my attitude to life generally – you have
to keep trying new things and you can’t worry about what other people think
of you.’
