SOLO TRAVEL
Trading Love Stories at a Bus Stop in New Zealand
How a 75-year-old local and I both found love and heartbreak in London
I shouldn’t have gone into that bakery.
That flat white cost me a bus back to my Airbnb and now, I have to wait another hour and a half until the next one.
I open up Uber on my phone — I can’t afford the $30 fee — I hold strong, sigh and make my way over to the bench at the bus terminal.
There sits an older local man, with a pot belly and a cheerful disposition.
After a “Good morning” and a couple of minutes of silence, he asks me where I’m from.
I tell him I’ve just left London to travel around Australia and New Zealand.
To which he replies, “I have a story about London.”
“When I was 20 years old I fell in love with a lady called Sylvia. The love of my life, I doted on her. Until one day she unexpectadly told me, she was going to London for a year. I begged her not to go. Back then, phone calls cost the equivalent of £100 so I wrote to her every week not knowing how long the letters would take to reach her.”
A bus arrives, not ours — he continues:
“I’d worked ruthlessly overtime at my job to save up enough money to visit her. I decided it would be a surprise. And after hopping on the underground from Piccadilly to Cockfosters where she lived, I knocked on the door, arms outstretched and shouted, ‘Surprise Sylvia!’”
I begin to smile.
“‘Well, have I got a surprise for you too…’ She said. ‘I’ve got an English boyfriend.’”
WHAT! My mouth is agape at how Sylvia could do this to him.
“She opened the door to reveal a tall, blonde handsome fellow. I’d tossed the coin at life and it hadn’t quite worked as I thought it would. But I didn’t let that stop me. I decided, that if I wasn’t to win her back, I might as well see the UK. So I headed north to Derbyshire, then onto Bradford-upon-Avon, Bath and The Cotswolds. Turns out I fell in love, but with the UK. So much so, I decided to stay there for 18 years. I still don’t know what happened to Sylvia. But god bless her because without that heartbreak, those cherished years I would have never experienced.”
We continued our conversation, I shared my own heartbreak tales of the capital and how a serendipitous meeting in a nightclub had led me to fall in love with an Australian, whose bluff I called when I booked a ticket and flew 9,500 miles across the Earth to see him — I did give him the courtesy of a heads up — but this time, I’d tossed the coin at life and it worked out.
He was pleased I’d found love, but being a New Zealander joked:
“There’s only one problem about Australia… Australians.”
I told him how my parents lived on The Isle of Skye in Scotland and how the landscape in Queenstown reminded me so much of there.
As chance would have it, he told me he’d been to Skye twice.
“Back when they hadn’t built that bridge and the romance of missing the last ferry was still alive.”
He said he’d not been able to see The Cuillin mountains because the mist had been so low on each visit. I promised him they looked just like the mountains behind us.
Before we knew it, our conversation would be stopped short by the buses we were both waiting for.
He hopped on the number 3 bus up to Frankton Flats, I was waiting for the number 3 bus up to Kelvin Heights.
I’d left with more than a few bags of shopping and a coffee that day.
I never knew his name, he never knew mine. But on my first day in New Zealand, his kindness and association with home settled me into my surroundings quicker than anything else.
Since that day. I always make an effort to travel without headphones and with my phone or book packed away. The world is a small place and the best part of travelling in my opinion, are the people you meet along the way.
Whether for a bus ride, a chapter, or your whole life.
Blink and you’ll miss them.
Listen, and they just might change everything.
Hannah is spending the next year to travel, rest and write. While she works on her debut novel, she’s travelling and housesitting around Australia with her partner, sharing her experiences and more, here on Medium.