Preparations

I'm prepared to wager that there isn't a man on this planet who hasn't done foolish things during the first flushes of love. Some buy their new girlfriends expensive gifts. Others are talked into a new wardrobe of collarless jackets and string T-shirts. Some rash souls promptly propose marriage and then spend the next two years going through a messy divorce. Me? Well, I invited my new love - the girl next door - on a six-month journey through Central America.

We'd only been on a few dates - four, I think. I had spotted her one morning a few months before, having a cigarette out the front of her house before heading off to work in her business suit, her blonde hair in a shoulder length bob. It had taken me all the time that had passed since to time to work up the courage to go next door and ask her out. But when we did go out it was so comfortable, so natural, I couldn't help but ask her to come away with me.

I know now it was because of a chemical imbalance in my brain. I was in love - mad with it - and my serotonin levels were shot.

I was still in what scientists have recently labelled the period of pathological romance, a time when the inner chemistry of a smitten brain resembles that of someone suffering from obsessive compulsion disorder (OCD).

Donatella Marazziti, a psychiatrist at the University of Pisa, first noticed the phenomenon of pathological romanticism when she began looking for a biochemical explanation for OCD. She found serotonin, a neurotransmitter chemical that has a soothing effect on the brain. OCD sufferers appeared to have low levels of serotonin, and, from her studies, so did people in the first stage of love. So when my friends told me I was crazy for taking a girl I'd only just met to a region prone to natural disasters and armed conflict, in a way they were right.

It certainly wasn't a plan that would have stood up to close scrutiny. Can you imagine what a trained psychologist, maybe even the esteemed Miss Marazziti herself, would have made of the whole thing? Me, reclining on the couch, explaining the reason why I thought a cute blonde was my ideal travelling companion through the likes of Nicaragua and El Salvador.

'Now Peter, how long have you known the Girl Next Door?'

'Well, I've only known known her for six weeks,' I'd sigh. 'But it feels as though we've known each other for ever!'

'And tell me, have you ever travelled with someone before?'

'Well, no. Not really,' I'd admit grudgingly. 'But it won't be a problem. The GND is so easygoing and laid back. We've been together for six weeks and we haven't even had a single fight!'

'Yes. I see,' she'd say, making a few notes in her notepad. 'Now, tell me again, where is it that you are planning to go?'

'Basically, a loop through Central America,' I'd say enthusiastically. 'We'll start in Mexico City and head south through Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Panama. Then we'll pop across to Jamaica for the cricket. Then Cuba. Then back to Cancun in Mexico before finishing again in Mexico City.'

'Hmmm,' she'd say, sucking on her pencil. 'Sounds pretty intense. Are you sure the GND knows what she is letting herself in for?'

It would be a valid point. In my mind I hadn't been thinking of the long arduous bus journeys, the active volcanoes, the shifting tectonic plates or the fact that we would be starting our journey at the tail end of the hurricane season. In my mind's eye we were frolicking on Caribbean beaches - albeit some of the less expensive ones - watching sunsets and gambolling dolphins - basically the sort of stuff you read in tawdry romance novels.

That was certainly how I sold the idea to the GND. I had already been planning to go to Central America before I had met her. To be honest, it was more the Mayan ruins and volcanoes and the fact that the Australian dollar could still buy you something there that had initially drawn me to the region. But when the GND started to seriously consider coming along, I shifted my focus onto things more coastal. She was contemplating throwing in her job as an office administrator, after all, and it would help convince her mother and father that their only daughter wasn't going to get kidnapped by mountain-based Marxist guerillas. In those serotonin-sapped days I may have even become convinced that it was because of the beaches that I'd thought of going to Central America and the Caribbean in the first place.

Thinking about it now, I doubt that I even had a scrap of serotonin in my system. How else do you explain the purchase of the companion fares? It was a special deal Japan Airlines were offering two people travelling together. In return for agreeing to fly every single part of the way with another person, both parties were offered a saving of $50 each on their airfares.

When the travel agent told me about it I should have said, 'Well, that's very nice, but as I have only been in this relationship for a matter of minutes, I think it would be wise just to take the normal fare, don't you?' She would have laughed knowingly and nothing more would have been said. But no, I had to talk to the GND about it.

'Do you think we should get the companion fare,' I asked cautiously.

'Do you think we should?' answered the GND. 'Do you think we should?' I repeated.

'Do you think we should?' answered the GND again.

From that moment, there was no way out of the companion fares. Although it only saved us $50 each, not to take the companion option would have suggested that we had doubts about the longevity of our relationship. Sure, it would have been sensible not to buy the companion fare. But as I was quickly finding out, love is rarely ever sensible.

It was the same when the GND showed me her packing list. I had asked her to make a list so I could go over it. I wanted to check for anomalies and - I don't deny it - prune it a little. I guess I had been left scarred by the only other time I had travelled with a member of the opposite sex. It was on a Marco Polo cruise around the Pacific. I was eleven and the woman in question was my mother.

There are no weight restrictions on cruise ships so my mother felt compelled to fill enough luggage to cover every contingency. My father struggled up the gangplank at the Sydney Overseas Terminal with half a dozen suitcases, stuffed solid and bursting at the seams with matching outfits for my sisters and me. Being the mid-seventies, each outfit was 100 per cent polyester, striped and in unnatural hues of orange, pink and brown. It never occurred to my mother that a) we didn't like the outfits or b) we didn't want to match our siblings.

As an only child my Mum didn't comprehend the acute embarrassment of wearing the exact same outfit - right down to the anchor-shaped buttons - as your kid sister. She'd just buy this horrible material by the bolt and run up identical outfits in four different sizes.

Worse still, my mother had noticed in the brochure for the cruise that there were going to be activities nights - fancy dress, cocktail parties, theme nights - and she'd brought enough beads, baubles and buttons to knock up appropriate outfits for each of us. (I'm sure that somewhere in the larger vinyl suitcases there was a sewing machine.) It all paid off, though. Dad won the Tarzan look-alike competition - no one else's wife had thought of bringing along a loin cloth on a cruise to Fiji - and my sisters, dressed as fairies, princesses and ballerinas, won their appropriate sections in the fancy dress competition.

I was the only one who let the team down. Mum had brought a leotard along for me, figuring that I wanted to be a ballet dancer too, but I refused on the grounds that I wanted to be an individual. (The fact that I had a crush on the girl in the cabin opposite and was concerned about how she would react to me in a tutu may have had something to do with it.) I was hoping to get out of the stupid fancy dress competition altogether. But my mother, being the resourceful woman she is, simply shrugged her shoulders and ran me up an outfit made from the shopping bags they got when they bought souvenirs in Suva. I didn't win my section, but the judges took pity on me and gave me a consolation, Best Use of a Brown Paper Bag, award.

So you can understand why I was a little nervous when the GND handed me her packing list. Especially when I noticed how long it was. It unfurled before me like one of those scrolls the old town criers used to read from.

'I've been good, haven't I?' said the GND.

I bit my tongue and smiled weakly. Then I noticed the hairdryer . then the haircurler . and then the hairspray, and felt compelled to speak. '

What do you need those for?' I spluttered.

'My hair is really thin and limp,' the GND replied matter-of-factly.

'Well, if it's thin it will dry quickly.'

'But because it's thin, I need to style it,' reasoned the GND.

'Style it? Just pulled it back into a ponytail.'

'I guess it's getting long enough to pull back,' answered the GND, unconvinced.

'There you go,' I said proudly. 'I just saved you a kilo. No hairdryer, curler, hairspray - pump action or otherwise.'

The subhead, Cosmetics, caught my eye. The GND had foolishly listed each item individually: foundation . powder . blush . eyeliner . mascara . lipstick . cleanser (rinse off) . moisturiser . suntan lotion . it was as if she was going on a Revlon shoot.

'The list looks long,' she explains. 'But remember. They're all little things.'

Then there were the personal grooming items: clippers . tweezers . scissors . razors . soap . washer . deodorant . two-in-one shampoo-conditioner (I smiled at this concession to saving space!) - the GND was going to be the neatest, cleanest, clipped person this side of Managua. When I pointed this out she just made a face and pleaded, 'It's better for you!'

About a metre down the list I came upon the clothes: two pairs of shorts - denim and canvas . four T-shirts . three dresses . two pairs of jeans - black and light canvas . one jacket . two long-sleeve tops . one spray jacket . one swimming costume . seven pairs of underwear and matching bras . four pairs of socks . one pair of walking boots . one pair of flat casual, light canvas shoes . one pair of sandals . and a cap.

'It's not a fashion parade, you know!' I spluttered. 'We're going to Central America. We'll be roughing it!'

I sat down, trying to catch my breath. The list was quite staggering. How would the GND carry it all? How would she lug it up on to the tops of buses and into the backs of utes? Would I end up having to carry some of it? I had a flashback of my father - sweating, staggering, cursing - and the gangplank bending under the weight.

'Oh, and by the way,' the GND smiled sweetly. 'I've decided to give up smoking two days before we go away.'

I think my serotonin levels must have been on the rise again. Because at that moment I had a spasm of what felt an awful lot like doubt. Not much, mind you, but enough.