Travel Experiences
I have been fortunate to have experienced travel in many parts of the world, sometimes related to work, sometimes not. I have a travel diary which shows I have been overseas about a hundred times and visited more than 70 countries, some of which no longer exist. I have visited 6 countries while communist, South Africa while still formally under Apartheid, and as described under my chapter on religion, have visited many parts of Iran and Israel. In many of these cases I have not been as a tourist, but have had professional contacts within, who have often led me to seeing countries as the locals, rather than visitors, see them.
Having traveled so often I have many amusing stories, or others of interest, not so amusing at the time, and will add them here from time to time.
1978: Australia v England
In 1978 I lived in England on Study leave at the Open University. With me were Lois and baby son Gregory. The deepest Australian rivalries in sport are against England, particularly the cricket Ashes, probably because England were our earlier colonial masters. Despite this Aussies and Poms (including my cousins) are normally the closest of friends in real life. But Lois and I each experienced something unusual in the year we lived there.
While I was working, Lois got to know a number of the ladies in the street. Sometimes the ladies would have a tea or coffee together. On one occasion one of the ladies had her elderly father there. He had been a Colonel in the British Army some time before. On one occasion he lamented "we have lost India, we have lost Africa, we have lost the West Indies, I understand even countries like Australia are virtually ruling themselves". Well the latter was more than true. Early in that decade Gough Whitlam had removed the Privy Council from being a court of appeal beyond the Australian High Court. And he in turn had been dismissed by a Governor General who did not do so after consultation with anyone in the UK.
In my case, one day I had a request to meet the Dean of my Faculty. He told me that the Faculty had now had several Australians spend Study Leave there and the experience was so positive that he was interested in establishing a formal exchange program. I telexed (as one did in those days) my Dean, who responded positively. The word must have got out as soon after I was approached by a head of a department in the Faculty, anxious to include one of his staff members in the scheme. I was a bit surprised and noted to him I was under the impression he did not like that staff member. His response was two words. "BOTANY BAY."
1988: Arrested in Zimbabwe
1990: Moscow. The Ukraine Hotel's Breakfast Room.
1994: Moscow. Foreigner Access to Kremlin.
2003: Toronto. The Blackout and another Arrest.
2009: Palmerston North. "Glad it's you and not me!"
2023: Detained by US Customs in Vancouver.
In 2023 I was in Vancouver to board a cruise ship to Alaska. At US Customs a woman after scanning my passport, said, with what I thought was a slight smile "are you wanted?" For a while I thought this comment was light hearted. But then I realised the word "wanted" had serious connotations. Shortly afterwards two men came to me and asked me to sit in a room, telling me where a toilet was if I needed it. After about 10 minutes a man took me for finger printing, which was a thorough process. I then waited for about 75 minutes doing nothing until a man came with my passport and told me I was free to board. He then explained that the reason for the detention was that Australia was a country notorious for issuing passports to different people with the same number and this was a case in point. The incident shook me up for more than the duration of the resulting Alaska cruise. When I returned home I reported the incident to Australian Foreign Affairs. They responde that they had put my number into the computer and my name was the only one that resulted. They went on to say that their system made it impossible to have ever issued passports to more than one person with the same number.