Another travel venture is in the offing and so it’s time to dust off the blog and head to a place that is new to me. As it happens, this trip will be new only in that I will actually be stepping onto New Zealand soil for the first time, although I have been there many times in my mind. In fact, this trip will complete my very first bucket list…and I didn’t even know I had a bucket list when I developed a desire to visit New Zealand.
It all began when I was traveling the world at 19 years old in 1961. I met an Aussie, John, who had a flat with other down unders, and he invited me to stay at their flat when I got to London…one thing led to another, and I stayed seven months while posing as a Canadian so that I could work “legally,” in England. John had bought an old taxi so that we could tool back and forth to the various weekend parties and trips around England. One evening, while at the local watering hole, we were talking about how we were going to get home in the coming months, since our travel time was ending. It was decided that we should drive the taxi to India…needless to say that with such a decision, alcohol played a very prominent role in our decision making.
Over the next few months, we cut back on our beer drinking and saved all that we could to make this journey possible. John worked in grocery store and would tear the labels off food cans so that they were impossible to sell and we bought boxes and boxes of food at dirt cheap prices. Of course, we never knew what was in them, but it was an adventure at night trying to figure out what was to be opened for dinner…
There were four of us, John and Alan, the two Aussies, Ian, the Kiwi and myself, “Hank the Yank,” as I was called. Naturally the journey was far too extensive to write about in a short blog, but it consisted of, amongst other things, a trip above the arctic circle, a stop at a nudist colony on an island off France, breaking down in the Iranian desert for three days, and a lot of very curious onlookers along the way, since we had the travel route painted on the side of the taxi…the driver rode in the little compartment in front while the other three road as passengers in the back. We had our picture taken in Istanbul and it appeared on the front page of the Ankara newspaper, which we saw several days later. Alas, I let my ego get the better of me many years back and I gave my copy of the paper to a Turkish girl as an attempt to impress her. I never got it back. Another lesson on how when I get my ego involved all kinds of negative things happen in my life.
But, we did drive the taxi to India and separated at that point…so with all the tales of New Zealand which were told in the taxi over the several months journey, it has always been on my list of places to visit, and finally it is reaching fruition. This round-the-world odyssey that took me two years to complete has made me who I am today.
New Zealand, Here I come…..finally.
