Piecing Together The Past In Old Travel Photos

It’s a puzzle I’ll never solve

Travellers in the 60s were a crazy bunch and I’m pretty sure my dad was one of the craziest, travelling from Wellington to London by van. That’s right, a van, with four wheels and not a hint of a propeller to get him across those big blue things we call oceans. It had to be shipped from New Zealand to Australia, Australia to Singapore, and Singapore to India before he could continue the rest of the journey by road.

It boggles my mind just to write this.

Not just because of the financial, logistical, and political nightmares he would have had to navigate to do so but because he did it all at a time before the internet and Google Maps. He was travelling across multiple countries where he didn’t speak the language without Tripadvisor to do his research and not even a hint of a GPS to guide him along the way.

And yet, despite these challenges, he still managed to make it to the other side of the world. I know this because I exist and it was in Paris where he met my mother [Alexa, play Hey Beautiful] but beyond this, the trip is an abstract. It’s a vague idea, little more than a fabled thing that my mum would talk about on occasion but could never fill in the blanks on that big canvas.

That was until a recent trip home.

I was digging through the past and uncovering old family relics when I came across a box of about a thousand camera slides. You know, those little pieces of plastic film that you could put in a carousel slide projector to show everyone back home how much fun you were having. It’s a job that is now much more easily accomplished by Instagram but back then these slides were the only way to make people jealous.

There was no way for me to know what was on them for sure, so I took a handful to the camera store and got them developed.

This was what came back.

Travel photos, hundreds of them, a lost record of my dad and his journey across the world. Seeing them felt like winning the lottery. I immediately took the rest back to the camera store and paid a whopping thousand dollars to get them all digitised, opening up a scrambled box of jigsaw pieces and beginning the monumental task of putting all the pieces back together.

The first thing I tried to do was catalogue these photos by country but I didn’t have any good reference points. They were all so jumbled up there was no way to tell if I was looking at Karachi or Kabul.

There were a few that were unmistakable, like the one above. I know Thailand when I see it and that, my friends, is Thailand. I’ve ridden on longtail boats just like it that were driven by people just like him. Knowing that my dad had done the same thing made me feel a connection with him that I never had.

There were other photos in there that I had either been to or could recognise. Places like the Taj Mahal and Checkpoint Charlie, that I could place on a map and dot out on a timeline. I also knew from my mum that Afghanistan was his favourite country and made an educated guess that the bulk of the photos might be from there.

So, what else do I know about this journey?

I know that he started in Wellington and got the van shipped to Sydney. From Sydney, he either drove to Brisbane or Perth, where he got the van shipped to Singapore. From Singapore, he drove through Malaysia and Thailand, before returning to Singapore and getting the van shipped to India. From India, he crossed into Pakistan possibly around the time of the second Indo-Pakistani war before driving up the Khyber Pass, into Afghanistan, through the Middle East, and popping out in Europe.

It was a route that I cobbled together through some second-hand sources and a photo of a map with the route sketched on it. The only problem is that I’m not sure if this was the route that he took or the route that he intended to take. Travel plans, they say, are folly at the best of times, and it’s safe to say there were probably some bumps along the way.

These photos opened up a whole new world for me. It was a window into the past, one of what travel was like before the internet, smartphones, and even Lonely Planet guidebooks were being published. More importantly, it was a window to my father and a chance to see the world through his eyes. For as long as I’ve known about his adventure, I’ve wanted to learn about it. Maybe even replicate it one day, when the places he travelled through become less war-torn than they are right now.

The only problem is that the opportunity to ask my dad about it passed thirty-one years ago, and I’ll never get it back.

For now, I’ll have to settle for these old travel photos. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to put all the pieces back together. I don’t think you ever can when you lose your dad at that age. The best you can hope for is to learn a little bit more about the man and maybe, if you’re lucky, see something of him reflected in yourself along the way.