In 1980, £1800 was all it took.

Hitting fifteen countries across the globe, my father, Peter Hare, trekked through cities and towns, hiked over mountains, and walked through jungles with only a dozen bills in his pocket. He traveled light–often only with a backpack–camped where he could, and lodged at hostels, meeting diverse people every step of the way. Throughout his two-year long journey, he witnessed military coups, taught hundreds of immigrant children, and eventually returned to his home country of New Zealand with nothing to his name. 

His experience was part of a larger tradition. In New Zealand, it is customary to engage in the “Big OE,” or the big overseas, where young adults take at least a year off and travel the world. This is popular in New Zealand in part because the island is so isolated from the rest of the world, with its only close neighbor being Australia. As those growing up on the island are rarely able to travel internationally, the big overseas is an opportunity to explore parts of the world that can, at times, seem so far away. Among the top destinations are London, New York, Queensland, France, Melbourne, and Italy. 

At the time of my father’s overseas experience, the law stipulated that citizens could only take NZ$2000 abroad, making frugal spending extremely important. Instead of the luxury resorts and hotels we associate with vacation, he stayed at youth hostels, shared rooms, and campgrounds. The conditions were often detestable, but traveling to him was never for splendor–it was for raw, real experiences.

My father started in the most popular destination: London, England. As he received only £800 from his New Zealand assets after currency conversion, he took up a job. “Living there was very difficult,” he told me. London, even during the 80s, was incredibly expensive, and he was forced to live in a room with another New Zealander, two Australians, and several South Africans. He cooked all of his own food, barely ever going out or enjoying London’s attractions. “My favorite meal was vegetable pie.” Canned tomatoes, he found, were cheap enough. 

After a brief visit to France, my father traveled to Spain. An individual extremely interested in religion and religious spaces, he took tours around historically Muslim regions in the south of Spain, including Granada, Seville, and Cordova. But when a group of tourists asked where the Muslim population was, the tour guide was blunt in her response. “They aren’t here.” They had been forced to flee the country centuries earlier under religious tensions; their presence, however, was still enshrined within the region’s architecture. He noted the Mezquita-Catedral De Córdoba (Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba) as an example of this, where Islamic arches hovered above Catholic altars. 

Although the ousting of the Muslims had occurred in 1492, the Spain he visited still had some ethnic complications. My father observed a plethora of armed police, boasting machine guns, stationed throughout the streets. He told me this was because of problems with the Basque people–and he was most likely right. Recent allegations sustain that during the 1980s, government-financed units waged a “war” on the Basque Homeland and Freedom organization, killing over two dozen Basques in the process. This was his first taste of instability in the regions he visited. 

He then traveled to Portugal, followed by Italy. “Italy was my favorite,” he told me with a smile. “The people were funny. They didn’t take themselves so seriously.” He told me about multiple works of art that he especially enjoyed, including Michelangelo’s David, a massive Renaissance marble sculpture of the Biblical figure David. Visiting religious spaces once more–this time Catholic–he was required to adhere to strict dress codes. It is customary, especially in Southern European countries, to wear attire that respects religious spaces. Greece was much the same, with its religious spaces requiring modest dress for both males and females. In one instance, a man wanting to enter a church tapped my father on the back. “Can I borrow your pants?” He relented.

His visit to Turkey, however, wasn’t as lighthearted–in fact, it was quite the opposite. During the 1980s, there was a Turkish coup d’etat, in which military and service commanders overthrew the civilian government. My father had been staying in a small hotel on his way from Izmir to Istanbul when he received startling instructions: he mustn’t leave the hotel under any circumstances. Over the three days that followed, military jets soared above the city, emitting a deafening noise, oftentimes flying quite low. During this time, he shared a room with six completely unknown individuals. “In those times, you hired a bed, not a room,” he told me. There were three Americans and three Palestinians, the latter of which were studying for a test to become doctors. After the three days had passed, he never saw any of them again. 

After the lockdown, he continued onto Istanbul. “At bus checkpoints along the way, the military would get on and check the people onboard,” he told me. In the city, he stayed at a youth hostel, where he met a group of German university students. “When you’re young, you get to know people fast.” Through all of the country’s internal chaos, he and his newfound friends were determined to travel the city. To pick his destination every morning, he would stand on the roof of the hostel and look for interesting structures or architecture. “That’s how I explored the city.”

Something, however, surprised him. “One of the German students was a woman, who was traveling alone. You don’t see that often.” He acknowledged the sad reality that women, unlike himself, could not venture out into the world alone. “One time, in a taxi, she introduced me as her husband to avoid harassment.” My father was lucky in that this trip was doable alone–for many, it wouldn’t have been.

He eventually ended up in Ankara, Turkey, where he stayed in the house of a Turkish family he had just met. “Their dream was to live in Australia,” he told me with a smile. “I think they thought I could somehow help them with that, but of course, I don’t know how to do that.” While some may have mistaken him for an Australian (Australians are not New Zealanders, although similar), others mistook him altogether for a native. In the backseat of a shared taxi, a woman spoke to him in Turkish, thinking he could understand her. “It must have been my bushy eyebrows,” he told me. She told him to give the driver some money for the ride, and when he didn’t respond, she became irritated. “Are you stupid?” she snapped. My father’s friend later translated the whole altercation for him. 

After a second brief visit to Greece, he traveled to Regensburg, Germany. Housing was a problem. “They only helped you to find a room if you said you were Catholic,” he told me. Even then, the living conditions were unlike anything he’d experienced before. “We had to share a small toilet–and it was in the stairwell. There was a basin in the corner to scoop water.”   

But for all his meager accommodations and frugal spending, money still didn’t grow on trees. My father had to return to the United Kingdom to find work. He eventually landed a job as a substitute elementary school teacher in the east of London, filling vacancies in any subject he could. He remembers teaching immigrant children from Bangladesh. “They were quite nice in the classroom,” he told me with a laugh, “but quite foul-mouthed while they played soccer outside.” He has many fond memories of that time, including traveling to the beach with the children, many of whom had never seen the ocean before. During this time, he’d also take van trips with friends around England, visiting places like Cornwall, Isle of White, and Bath. 

After a brief trip back to Germany and Austria, it was time to think about heading back to New Zealand. But unlike nowadays, the journey back home wasn’t just a flight layover or two. Instead, my father was able to purchase just one ticket for a multi-airline trek home, making multi-month stops in different countries on the way there. Instead of the efficiency we all value in airplane travel, he opted for a more slow–yet rewarding–path.

His first stop on the way back home was Egypt. During his time there, he experienced yet another flash of instability. On October 6th, 1981, the president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, was shot and killed by members of the army. “They played funeral songs on the radio. And there were officers stationed all around the city,” he told me. The landscape, he found, somewhat matched the mood. “Everything in Cairo just looked brown.” 

The next stop was India. He stayed there for six months, traveling around various regions of the large country. “There were so many monkeys,” he told me. “I was in a post office in Varanasi, and a troop of monkeys just strolled through. People paid no mind–actually, they kept their distance, as the monkeys could be quite aggressive.” The monkeys were extremely adapted to the human environment, jumping from rooftop to rooftop to get around the city. People would wait on top of buildings with big sticks to shoo them away.

It wasn’t just the monkeys; the mannerisms of the people in India were also quite unfamiliar. He remembers boarding a train in the northern region. “A woman with a baby was trying to get on,” he told me. “She handed me her baby and went to a different part of the train. I didn’t realize she was getting on–I thought she had walked away–and for five minutes, I was holding this baby.” She eventually showed up, and he happily gave up the child. The woman’s trust in a pure stranger was striking.

After half a year, my father moved on to a close neighboring country–Nepal. He went on hikes from village to village, camping in the mountains. “At night, you couldn’t see anything,” he told me. “I would hold my hand up to my face and see nothing.” The region had low light pollution and high elevation, allowing for the dark night sky to engulf everything under it. 

One of the last stops on his trip home was Malaysia. He remembers visiting a temple in which a fortune teller resided. He skeptically agreed to have his fortune read out to him. “How will my life be?” my father asked, not expecting much. “You should always wear black and navy blue,” the seer told him. “You will have one child.” My father left the temple laughing–but decades later, these visions have come true. “My closet does have a lot of blue and black. And you are my only child.”

After a stop in Singapore and a layover in Australia, my father was home. Two years had passed, and thousands of dollars had been spent. Materially, he had nothing to his name. But there were no regrets. Because although choppy and hard to recall, these stories have lived in my father’s head for almost five decades–and they’re priceless.

Throughout his two-year long journey, he witnessed military coups, taught hundreds of immigrant children, and eventually returned to his home country of New Zealand with nothing to his name.