In her early 20s, Dianne Harlow packed a bag, boarded the Fairsea ship and did what countless Kiwis and Australians have done over the decades; headed to London to work and travel Europe.
It was 1967 and like many young travellers, the Sydney-born Aucklander didn’t get far before finding a friend.
“I got off the ship in Naples and met another Australian girl, in a youth hostel above the city,” Harlow said, adding that the pair went on to take countless hitchhiking trips together during her three years in London. “We hitchhiked north to Scandinavia, south to Morocco and east to Turkey.”
However, this chance encounter was nothing compared to the one she made during her final big trip before returning home, in 1969.
“I was working at the Bank of Scotland on Trafalgar Square and one of the staff came to me and said, We’ve met these Aussies,” she said. In actuality, it was an Australian and a Kiwi who, along with a Brit, were looking for a fourth person to travel with to India.
Harlow knew these opportunities didn’t come up all the time, so she met the group and “no time later” they jumped in a van together, bound for Kolkata.
It was during a drive across Turkey when the group spotted something truly incredible; another car sporting a New Zealand sticker. Even more shocking, the van didn’t stop for them. Instead, it kept cruising along the dusty, deserted roads.
“They didn’t stop and we couldn’t believe it,” Harlow said. “It wasn’t like you were passing many cars in a day, generally none, let alone one with a Kiwi sticker on the back.”
So, when the groups finally met at a campsite in Teheran, it wasn’t the warmest of meetings.
“We were miffed to say the least, we were not happy campers at all,” Harlow said. Then, they heard the full story, which involved a broken van part and a ‘No. 8 wire’ solution.
“Their back axle was broken and was being held up by a brick. They didn’t dare stop for fear the brick would fall out, which it frequently did,” Harlow explained, so they rarely stopped unless necessary. Amends were made and the groups got on well until they parted ways a day or two later.
The chance of seeing a Kiwi in Teheran is slim but the odds of meeting them again is even slimmer. Yet, after reaching Kolkata, a city of seven million people at the time, the group was astonished to see Ken, one of the Kiwi men.
“He was in the middle of the road waving us down amidst cars, carts, trucks, tuk-tuks. He knew we’d get there eventually and would have to go to the nearby American Express for mail,” Harlow recalled.
As it happened, Ken’s valuables (including his passport) had been stolen from the airport hotel the night before his flight home, stranding him in Kolkata. Fortunately, Harlow’s group had space in their van, where he stayed for a few nights.
After just a few days, Harlow admitted Ken was still a stranger yet felt she could trust him.
So, when she decided to head across to Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, while her group stayed in India, she accepted Ken’s suggestion to travel together, after he got an emergency passport.
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Some 53 years on, the exact dates and destinations are a little foggy for Harlow, but the pair eventually ended up in Singapore. With money quickly dwindling, they hopped on a dilapidated passenger boat to Jakarta and a train from Java to Bali which, back then, was without tourists or hotels.
“After staying some time in that paradise we flew to East Timor and finally to Darwin,” Harlow said. The final leg of the journey involved hitchhiking 4000km to Sydney, which they did in just three rides, with US$10 to spare between them.
All the while, Harlow said the pair were friends and travel partners and nothing more. Yet, after spending time together in Sydney, it deepened into a relationship. The only problem? As a Kiwi, Ken eventually had to return to his life in New Zealand.
“Phone calls were expensive so we sent letters back in the ‘old days’ when you wrote an aerogram,” Harlow said. After months of back and forth, Ken asked her to come to New Zealand, and she agreed.
“I went over and I ended up teaching because that was what I was doing back in those days.”
When Harlow’s mother fell ill, they returned to Sydney where they eventually got married and built a house. But Harlow had one condition; they had to keep exploring the world.
The couple travelled to New Guinea on to the Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan from where they took a boat to Vladivostok and boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway. This was the long way around the world to Canada where they lived for two years. Decades of adventure followed.
Today, Harlow calls North Shore her home and although Ken and she went their separate ways, her passion for travel hasn’t cooled in the slightest.
“I’ve just come back from the Balkans – Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro,” she says, with plans to spend September in Australia riding the Indian Pacific Rail.
“It’s been good. It’s been really good, and it hasn’t stopped.”